Episode 164 | Jan 22, 2026

The Truth About Weight Health, With Ashley Koff

Is it possible that our obsession with weight loss is actually keeping us from achieving true health? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi sits down with Ashley Koff, founder of the Better Nutrition Program and author of the new book Your Best Shot, to explore a revolutionary shift from weight loss to weight health. Together, they discuss the science of metabolic hormones and why focusing on building and repairing the body is far more effective than the traditional path of restriction.

“We have to break up with the idea of weight loss because it disempowers. We have the opportunity to pivot to weight health and help people totally shift from a place of feeling disempowered to feeling empowered.”

Ashley Koff

As a practitioner with over 25 years of experience, Ashley has spent much of her career in the high-pressure environment of Hollywood, helping celebrities navigate the complex world of nutrition and body image. Her experiences led her to realize that weight is simply a key performance indicator of health rather than the goal itself. Ashley explains how nutrition acts as a form of hormone therapy by providing the body with the amino acids and nutrients it needs to function naturally. She also addresses the Ozempic chic trend and the cultural tendency to judge others’ bodies, offering a refreshing perspective on how we can break up with our own weight biases to better support our well-being.

The battle against weight bias and “infobesity” is one that health coaches help their clients fight every day. Ashley highlights how coaches act as the essential mirror for clients by helping them move past generic information and into a state of personal insight. Her approach includes practical tips for identifying bio-individual signals, such as how a client feels after eating or whether they are actually absorbing their nutrients. Coaches can use these insights to help clients move away from the “non-compliant” label and toward sustainable, functional medicine informed health plans.

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Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Today on “Health Coach Talk,” I have a conversation with Ashley Koff. She, I think, is one of the most brilliant people in the space of nutrition. We talk about a new book that she has coming out and get into a whole variety of topics. Some are around GLP-1 agonists, these weight loss medications. And we get into a talk that I think was really important, and it’s about biases. And if you are listening and you’re a health coach, how do you explore your own biases and focus on how you may be judging people unwittingly?

So, let me tell you about Ashley. Ashley Koff is the founder of the Better Nutrition Program, the nutrition course director for UC Irvine’s Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute’s Integrative & Functional Medicine Fellowship, and a faculty member at the Integrative and Functional Nutrition Academy, where she teaches an integrative and functional nutrition approach to obesity and weight management. She is also the author of the book “Your Best Shot,” which was just released. This is a wonderful book, I got to say.

She has been a practitioner for over 25 years. She’s leading a transformative movement into personalized nutrition, turning better, not perfect choices into practical, sustainable strategies that deliver real health outcomes. Through patient stories and personal experience, she shows that optimal health is not just possible. It’s essential to live your fullest life.

Koff has been recognized as one of CNN’s top 100 health makers. She has been featured in InStyle as Hollywood’s leading dietitian and has been selected as Westin’s Global Nutrition Ambassador. I know that you are going to enjoy my conversation with Ashley. Welcome, Ashley. Great to be with you.

Ashley: Yes, thank you. And I just recently got to hug you IRL. I feel so fortunate. Yeah, so good to see you again.

Dr. Sandi: Yes, so our paths have crossed in so many ways. I believe I was thinking, as I was reviewing my notes, I first met you during the pandemic when Clubhouse was all the rage.

Ashley: That’s right.

Dr. Sandi: And great connections were made. I thought, “I love this person. We are so aligned.”

So today we are going to talk about what I am very excited about, which is your book, “The Best Shot.” I would love to talk about diving into this topic that you are now passionate about, and that is this whole idea of GLP-1.

So let’s start by what you have described as this epidemic of suboptimal hormone function. Now, when we think of hormones, we think of sex hormones, for example, and estrogen. But let’s talk about GLP-1s and CCK and PYY. People might not be familiar what those are. Why are they underperforming, and what can we do about it?

Ashley: Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, so let’s take everyone on a journey, because my true passion lies in, and the reason I call my book “Your Best Shot” is I want people to have your best shot at fulfilling your life purpose. This is big, right? When we think about your life purpose, one of the things that we know keeps us from that, and it kept me from that, so this is really personal, is when we are encumbered, when we’re disempowered in being able to enjoy our own health. To feel like I’m trying these things and my body is either in pain, breaking down, not doing…like, all of these different pieces, right? And we have to focus on that. We tend to spend money, time, and really importantly, our hope.

So we come in and we’re like, “Okay, I’m trying all these things.” My passion lies in helping people understand that where we’ve been with this idea, in weight management, weight loss, that we’re supposed to be better managers of our weight, or that we can’t even just manage our weight. And it’s been separated from an understanding of how the body functions. And so I’ve used this term, I’ve come up with this term, weight health, to help us understand that what we really need to be thinking about is that our weight is a key performance indicator of our health. And when we talk about weight, we’re really talking about our bone, our muscle, and our fat.

So, why is that tied into GLP-1s? Because GLP-1s are not a medication. The brilliance of GLP-1, the medication, is that it’s now showing all of us how our bodies work, that we are designed with weight health hormones. So to your point, we have sex hormones. We have a thyroid hormone. We have insulin and glucagon, which are our blood sugar hormones. We have leptin and ghrelin, which are our hunger and our satiety hormones. And it turns out that things like GLP-1, GIP, PYY, and CCK, they regulate our appetite and our hunger. They regulate our blood sugar. They regulate our bone, our fat, our muscle. They even regulate where water goes in the body.

So, when we look at, around the time we were on Clubhouse, 9 in 10 Americans were deemed to not meet the criteria for metabolic health. And what we unpack from that is we have dysfunction or suboptimal function of these weight health hormones. And the proof is in the millions of people who are using a GLP-1 agonist and seeing benefit. But for every person who is using a GLP-1 agonist, there’s at least 100 people that are not. And I want to make sure that we all have a plan to optimize our weight health. So that’s the whole picture, my dear. Yes.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. And as a nutrition professional, you have always been focused on your work on nutrition. Can you talk about nutrition as hormone therapy? Because when you say hormone therapy, we’re thinking hormone replacement. But how can things like protein timing and fiber, phytonutrients, microbiome diversity, how can that naturally stimulate our weight and our health hormones?

Ashley: I love that because often we think that estrogen or insulin or other hormone replacements and GLP-1 agonists are a hormone replacement therapy. So they’re doing the exact same thing when you give the body GLP-1 or GIP. But what they’re not doing is they’re not optimally resourcing the body, and that’s the problem at the core. So let’s start with the microbiome, because you bring that up, and what do we feed, because I think one of the biggest nutrition myths is when we call a food healthy or not healthy. Actually the body doesn’t call it healthy or not healthy until it gets where it’s supposed to go. So we might eat kale and be like, “Oh, I just did something great,” but if it doesn’t go to where it’s supposed to go, if it can’t get there, so our digestion has to be optimized. And hydration is also a part of that because one of hydration’s jobs is to bring nutrients into the cells on that part.

So when we think about nutrient optimization, one of the most important things to understand is, first of all, we have had really bad standards. We have had standards that I call really dumb amounts when we had the RDAs. And when we look at the amounts today, what those amounts were designed for was to prevent certain diseases. Well, in doing that, when we don’t give the body an optimal amount, so it doesn’t have what it needs, where it needs it, when it needs it, then the body turns around and says, “You know what? I’m not going to focus on building muscle because right now I need to make sure that your heart can pump,” or, “I’m not going to focus on your hair. I need to make sure that your lungs have enough oxygen,” whatever it is on that part.

So nutrient optimization, one of the reasons it’s so important to assess what we’re taking in and think of our total nutrition, our food and our supplements, and understand that absorption and things like that may be impacted by our medications and our lifestyle choices, is we need an optimal amount. So, one of the brilliant parts of nutrition, and I fundamentally believe things like protein and timing and others are the tools for hormone optimization, is that we need to give the body enough, an optimal amount, so that it can do what it needs to do.

So, I’ll give you the example of protein. When we don’t get in the right amount of protein for our bodies, or we get it in the wrong amounts and timing… As an example, we might be like, “Oh, I need to get in a lot of protein,” and just eat a lot at dinner and not maybe have enough protein at breakfast or lunch or other times in the day. Or if we don’t give our body the right amino acids, it actually can’t make… Our weight health hormones are peptide hormones. They’re made of amino acids. So we actually have to have the protein to prioritize there, because that’s one of the reasons that we see suboptimal weight health hormone function.

Timing is really important because our body needs to… It has a whole to-do list. And when we’re taking in nutrients, we want to be active so the body uses them in that time period. We also need to recognize that we have another window. So, if we have our caloric or activity window, another window called our recovery window. And our recovery window is when the body does everything it needs to do. It needs to do deep cleaning. It needs to take time out. It needs to restore things on the shelves. It needs to process things for elimination. That’s what we are supposed to be doing when we are sleeping or when we’re in our recovery mode.

If we carry over from our caloric and activity window into our recovery window, the body has to address those things and it doesn’t get to what is on its recovery to-do list. So the timing… Like, one of the things that we work on is that…. And I point this out in the book. It’s so important to maybe you are going to do well with a 10 or a 12-hour window of when you take in calories. But it’s really important to look at when you start that window and when you finish that window and make sure that it’s optimal for your body.

And therein lies I think what’s really important in the nutrition part. You need someone who is helping you and working as a mirror to actually lean into, not saying to you, “Eat this, don’t eat that.” You can find that online. Like, that’s not an issue. You need somebody who says to you, “Hey, when you’re eating this, how are you feeling? What are the signals that the body is showing?” And what if we actually want to experiment with something that maybe hasn’t felt doable for you? How could we try to actually experiment with it?

And that’s where I think our collaboration has really come in. I love being able to talk with and help in the training of coaches because that’s the job of the coach. That isn’t even the job of a nutrition professional, or often said differently, nutrition professionals should also be trained as coaches to be able to do that, if they want to do both on that part. Yeah.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. I just think this is brilliant and, from my perspective, revolutionary, because I look back and think it really wasn’t until I think it was in my 70s when I finally got what you’re talking about. Because prior to that, I was raised in that generation, and still many younger people, calories in, calories out. It’s all about going on a diet and counting calories and eating less and exercising more. And I still hear that even from my contemporaries who think that, and cramming it all in at dinner. Or I’m seeing people who are splitting entrees. There’s no way they’re getting enough protein at any meal, at dinner or at any time. Or they’re in too much time-restricted eating and particularly for women who are just caught up in this.

So, I think you are right, and that’s why we train coaches to help them and also help them really to look inward and to see why are they doing this, why are they wanting to lose weight. And often it’s issues like they’re aging, they don’t feel attractive, and they feel like, “Oh, if only I were slimmer,” and focusing on issues that go beyond or are doing a disservice to them.

So speaking about going beyond weight loss, you talk about that a lot, the critical need to stabilize blood sugar, for example, and repair gut health. But we’re still stuck in this weight loss. I heard somebody the other day who was still talking about calories, “Oh, I can eat this because it doesn’t have that many calories.” And the focus is on losing weight. And for years, especially women, we are focused on weight loss.

Ashley: Yeah. And by the way, I would say with men and with boys right now, whereas we as women have really been dealing with this for decades and maybe even centuries in terms of really feeling like our size matters, our value is associated. For me, it was really that my belly was a visible sign of a weakness, of something that I wasn’t strong enough to deal with and to control, and that kind of thing.

And men, unfortunately, it has just…it’s, like, hit them I really think in this century, and it’s hit very fast. And so I see such disordered eating in men of all ages, and especially men who feel like they’ve suddenly woken up at 40 or 50 and are like, “I have these health issues.”

I want us to think about a word. I want to think about lose. I feel kind of silly in a way telling you this, but we’re talking to your audience. But in the world of psychology and psychotherapy, lexicon matters in how we see ourselves. And so when you think about lose, when you think about “biggest loser,” when you think about… I was the on-air dietitian for four reality TV shows, and I consistently tried to infuse a space where how can I help you get healthy while helping you achieve a goal, which was in my opinion was fat loss and muscle gain.

I even tried at Cedars-Sinai in 2004 to rename weight loss surgery to health gain surgery, and I completely failed. And I think these words really matter because when you follow a process of loss, in no other area of our life do we just sit there and are like, “Lose more. Be a loser. Do all of this stuff.” And what ends up happening is it is so disempowering. And so I think one of the most important messages that we can have is really thinking about what if our body is an operating system. It absolutely is, like our soul, and we have these other components that are not. But if we look at the actual human body, it is an operating system.

And when we look at that, the job is to optimally resource it, to help it operate better. That requires building and repairing. There’s no approach out there. You don’t come in and try to lose something on your phone for the operating system to do better. You don’t go and try to have your car just lose more gas or lose more oil. You come in and you’re like, “What’s going on? How do I repair it? How do I optimally resource it?” That’s how the car runs better.

And so this concept of building is just… It’s so important. And the concept of weight health comes in and says we want to understand that our weight composition is giving us a bunch of signals. So, if you have fat in the wrong place, if you have excess fat… We call fat in the wrong place is visceral fat. If you have excess fat, then we want to understand why. Why is the body allocating that? Why is it putting it there? And along with it, it’s storing toxins in there. So, when I follow a path to shrink the fat cell, if I lose weight too quickly, I am going to be unhealthy because I’m going to have a lot of these toxins coming out. And if I use a GLP-1 agonist that’s also slowing, delaying my gastric emptying and suboptimally or further exacerbating underlying digestive issues or creating them, I’m creating a health concern in the body.

And so when I do that, I have to realize that I can’t expect outcomes of being healthy. And I do believe, I know that so many people will say like, “Well, if I could first just have my weight be better, then I’ll focus on my health.” But the moment that any of us have an actual health crisis, and many of us are having them in tandem, any time if we discover cancer, if we have blood sugar that’s going too high and too low and feel really shaky or that sort of body impairment, the risk of what that means… Like, I had somebody who was a bus driver, and he was a bus driver for school kids, and he was diabetic. I had somebody who sat in Congress at the time that we were voting on whether or not to invade Syria. I don’t know if the invasion was right. Whatever we were going to do with Syria, and I was like, “We got to have your blood sugar good.” I need you to make these… You are people in my community that we need to make sure are optimally functioning.

So, I can’t just be concerned about your weight. And I think that that’s, like, for everyone, we want to come back to and just really break up with the idea of this weight loss because it disempowers. And if you’re encouraging anyone to lose weight, and this includes a lot of doctors and programs today that just feel like different versions of the weight loss programs that I’ve gone on at different points in my life, where you’re high-fiving people based on weight loss, or where you’re the pharmaceutical company saying that this drug is better than this one because people lose more weight or they lose weight faster, we are creating problems. And we have the opportunity to pivot to weight health and say sometimes the HOV lane feels very attractive but the country road, or walking for a bit, is the better path for you. And I think that you’ll hear me on a soapbox here, but this is my life’s work but I also know that this is the life-saving work that we now have the opportunity to do because it really is going to help people totally shift from a place of feeling disempowered to feeling empowered.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, it is so important. It is critical. And you mentioned physicians, and so often they’re just telling people, “You need to lose weight. You’d feel better. You’d get healthier. Start with losing weight.” Then they come out of that encounter focusing on losing weight. And I see it all the time. And in our culture, people are complimented, “You look so great. You’ve lost so much weight. Oh, wow. You look fantastic.” And I will look at them and say, “This is a skinny fat person. This is a person who did not do strength…” It is how about get strong, lift weights, and…

Ashley: Digestion, you know what I mean?

Dr. Sandi: Yes. Yeah.

Ashley: That’s a good point. I think one of the things that’s so sad about this weight loss society is we also discount… We have so many people that feel like their suboptimal health, like, all of a sudden happened to them at some point. Like, I was talking to a woman the other day. She’s 60 and she’s like, “Ashley, I don’t understand. I have been thin my whole life.” And I said, yeah, the way that you have been thin your whole life has been… And she has very severe digestive issues right now and she’s, “What happened?” And now she is also having cardiovascular issues.

And society right now, in a very good way, is also telling her that it’s her hormones leaving. I’m so glad that we’re having that conversation. So, here’s what happens when your sex hormones leave. That, however, comma, is you have been told by society that there was nothing wrong with you from a health standpoint for decades. You’ve been ignoring every signal that was on the table. You were suboptimally resourcing your body. Your heart issues didn’t show up because your hormones left, like all of these other things and so I think there’s a little bit wrong as well with the HRT message, that hormone replacement therapy, that’s just suggesting that all of a sudden women, when our bodies change, we need to do things differently.

No. We need to be doing things differently from infancy. From the time that we are moving forward, we need to have a weight health, building-the-body approach. And by the way, that’s also going to help you when you arrive at perimenopause and menopause be in a healthier state, so that your body is not going to need… It’s still going to need a life-stage changing approach and probably going to need hormone replacement therapy. But I think we’re betting too much on hormone replacement therapy as this fix. And it’s a tool that still requires all of this hormonal optimization that we’re talking about, which are our nutrition and lifestyle choices. Yeah.

Dr. Sandi: I think that is such a good point because you just see it everywhere. All you have to do is scroll through popular podcasts and everyone is talking about hormones, hormone replacement. And it’s a good thing that women are now educated and are awakening from the Women’s Health Initiative Study. But what about looking at balancing those appetite hormones, the ones we started the conversation with, the GLP-1s, GIP, PYY, CCK? These are ignored. And so I think that would be the start. And, yeah, really focusing there, and it all goes back to the gut microbiome.

And I have recently started making Dr. William Davis’ yogurt. I got his special yogurt and I’m like, “Wow, these are…” And it feels so different than in my younger days where I was… And there’s a Facebook group associated with making this yogurt, and people will write in, “Well, I’m concerned. You make it with full-fat dairy and I’m going to gain weight.” And so there’s still that sense.

One of the trends that I’m seeing in popular culture, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and what we can do to educate, because it’s now trending, the Ozempic body. And we’re seeing celebrities who are gaunt, who look dangerously underweight. And it reminds me of, well, going back in my time, Twiggy was a model in the ’60s. And all these women, myself included, I was a teenager at that time, people were getting so… We didn’t think at all about muscle, and it was all about weight.

And then in the ’90s, there was something called heroin chic, where it was a trend that young people were gaunt and obviously unhealthy. And now it’s Ozempic chic. So, I just wondered what you are seeing and you can comment on that and…

Ashley: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Sandi: It’s really scary.

Ashley: Well, it is and it isn’t. I have a different take, and so I just want to acknowledge that this is different. But I want people to hear me out because I do feel, as somebody who’s worked in this field, in particular somebody who has been helping Hollywood bodies get and stay weight healthy for 25 years, that this is an important one.

So, I think the first statement is that there is no decade ever where women being too thin… And I’ll say women, even though I was just watching a video from MTV in the ’80s, and I was watching a band and I’m like, “I don’t think I ever noticed how unhealthfully skinny those men are.” So, it’s interesting that we talk about Twiggy but we don’t talk about how skinny Mick Jagger was.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, you’re right. Yeah.

Ashley: We don’t talk about all of that. So, I just want to acknowledge all that. And I also just don’t want to point out Mick Jagger. This was a totally different video, but I was like, wow, we forget because drug skinny was a thing. Drug skinny, by the way, is still a thing so I just want to be clear. There has never been a point in time where Hollywood has not been too thin. I just want to be very clear on that. I have worked in that space.

Now, the difference is with what people are using today, Ozempic is different, and I want to talk about that. But from the moment that I landed in Hollywood, I had patients who were young kids, you all know them, who were on Adderall. And I had patients, kids, men and women who were using cocaine. Heroin chic was heroin chic because people were using heroin, okay? And I want to be very clear, Ozempic is not heroin, and Ozempic is not misusing Adderall, and Ozempic is also not using cocaine. And I do believe that one of the things that is happening is that Hollywood always seems like—and we’ve done this and we’ve created this environment—a space where suddenly it’s okay to shame people for their size and to talk about them and to point at people and say they’re too thin. And this comes to me very personally. I have a very famous celebrity right now who is privately battling cancer. And as a result, she is very thin and her hair is falling out. And she has wanted to keep this private. And her picture is everywhere right now where everybody is calling her Ozempic chic and they’re saying she needs to stop the Ozempic and it’s wrong and we have to stop it.

And for every woman or man who sees a person and decides that they are not a person, because that’s what we do on social media in particular or in the media, and decides that it is okay for us to comment publicly or to speculate on what they are doing, you have to stop it. And if you are a healthcare professional, you absolutely have to stop it because that’s not okay. We don’t know what is going on with that person behind the scenes. I think of—oh, my gosh—Chadwick Boseman. And I think about the fact that he was battling cancer in his performances and all these other things, and I see other people… And we have to come back and be like, first of all, these are humans and it’s on them to tell their story. The second thing is there are a lot of people in Hollywood who have been stuck in the weight loss mode for decades, who have been doing so many things to try to get their body to a certain size, and they have been in the weight loss space. And they are now… Maybe Ozempic is a vehicle towards weight health.

Ozempic has been helping people break up with horrible habits around alcohol, around sex addiction, around drug addiction, and also around what I think even oversimplifies it, food noise. This thought process of even if I’m never putting food in my mouth, including if I have an eating disorder, it is actually helping those people. And it is also helping people optimize their blood sugar and it’s helping people optimize their heart health. So, I’m pissed. I’m out there and I’m like, “This is not an okay thing.” And if you decide to talk about this publicly, then what I want you to do is not and I want you to come back and have a conversation with yourself, because here’s what it’s doing. It’s triggering you. Any time somebody looks at someone else and thinks about their weight, it is triggering you. It is maybe reminding you how you felt when you saw Twiggy, as an example, or when I saw someone and I was like, “I want to be that person.” Because essentially, our problem is that we’ve all wanted to be other people based on their body size, and we’ve tried things to be other people based on their body size. And this is not okay. That’s the part.

And so you have work to do. To me, that’s the answer. You have the therapy work to do. You can work with a coach to help you figure out, “Hey, what is my body actually telling me?” You can work with a dietitian. I don’t actually think doctors are very good in this space, except for they may help us with being able to diagnose some of the issues to understand what’s going on with someone. But I think it is very much a shame on us in that part. And I had a friend just recently in Hollywood say that…she’s like, “Hey, I was always the thin friend, and now all my friends are joking that some of them are even thinner than me.” And I was like, okay, well, there’s something wrong in your friend group if that’s the conversation, right?

So, what’s the authentic friend? And we had a great conversation about the fact that they are actually leaning into doing things like playing pickleball now instead of going out for drinks or going out for food or that kind of thing. So, there is healing that can happen, and I’m very comfortable… If somebody doesn’t like the way that I’m saying it, but I actually think the problem is with the person who is calling people Ozempic chic on that part, not so much the question of what somebody is doing in Hollywood on that piece. Yeah.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you for that, because I think that really brings clarity to what is a very complicated, not black and white issue, because we do… And I think whenever we get into that space of judging others, comparing yourself to somebody else or making that quick judgment. And we just see it all the time. It’s headline news. It’s a cover story. And so it filters our perception.

And often I will see people who are quite skinny. And I always think, as you just… Okay, what’s going on with them? Because the first impulse might be to judge, “Oh, there’s something wrong.” But then why? And so looking at that. And I think we could say the same for which we won’t get into but cosmetic surgery. I just heard people who’ve had six cosmetic surgeries, but what’s going on with them as opposed to, “Oh, this is wrong. They shouldn’t be doing this. They look artificial.” But really, there’s a back story that you don’t know. And I think that’s the beauty of coaching, to help people really get back to what really matters in their life and finding meaning and purpose.

And I love what you said as we sum up from infobesity to clarity, because there’s food noise. There’s noise about popular media sites about celebrities, about Ozempic, about other drugs like this. And that it really is turning inward to finding your own personalized, functional medicine informed, I love the phrasing, weight plan. So can you just comment on that and then tell us about your book, which is being released?

Ashley: Thank you. Yeah, and I want to put a challenge out there to any coach and any practitioner. We’ve had conversations like this. We get to have these intimate conversations as part of your group, or if somebody is following me or coming to something. This brings up our weight biases. We all have biases. This is my topic, and I have weight biases. And we need to break up with the myths of the noncompliant patient. I think the world of coaching is helping us do so much of that because doctors are often so… They were trained to be like, well, if somebody is not doing this, then they’re not doing it, right, as opposed to, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this?” or “Maybe this isn’t actually even what’s better for you.”

And I share a couple stories about my time in the reality TV world and some patients where the doctors called me in because they were like, “All right,” they’re like, “Bring in the A team. Ashley’s coming in because this person’s a failure,” or we’re going to tell the story of this person as a failure instead of actually figuring out what would work for them. And I think that’s really important. So, we have to break up with that.

I think the second thing is to acknowledge that you can be very well trained as a coach, as a doctor, as a dietitian, as a pharmacist, as any practitioner group that I forgot there, and you can also not be the person who is able to do this work. It brings up things for you personally. We have to step into that space and realize that it’s highlighting something for you to heal from, that our patients are a vehicle for us to heal as well as for us to help them heal. And that’s the gift that my patients have certainly brought I think through that piece.

And so one of the things that I think in breaking up with all of this, and Chapter 4 in my book is called “Shit to Unlearn.” There’s an asterisk in there so I don’t curse in the book but you’re hearing it from me. But we have got to break up with so much of this information because there is a real risk that as a practitioner, even as a coach, etc., that if we keep bringing information forward to someone or that we at any point make them feel that the acquisition of knowledge will help them get healthier, we have disempowered them. We have made things worse. We have actually contributed to infobesity, which is overwhelming their brains and, as a result, contributing to suboptimal weight health.

So, our jobs are actually to come in and to say, “Hey, that might be the information that’s out there from research that could be true or could be true for some people. But let’s do the mindset work and let’s do the insight work. Let’s understand what your body is actually telling us.” And right now, even though the whole messaging is we need to get more protein, what your body is telling me is that it’s not even breaking down and absorbing the protein that you’re getting in. So, that’s going to be the work that we’re going to do first. And that’s really, for me, that side of taking information, and it’s even good information, and saying that’s actually not better for you right now but we have insights about your body and how we can move forward.

And so what I did with my book was I realized we needed a playbook because if somebody is questioning, “Do I need a GLP-1 agonist, if somebody is on an agonist, or for the millions and millions of people that never will use an agonist because of access, because it is not the better choice for them because they were on it and then went off of it and now still want a plan to be able to optimize their weight health, I wrote this book because we need a playbook for the patient but we also need a playbook for the practitioner. And I truly believe that when we create an environment where the practitioner and the patient are working from the same playbook, we get optimal outcomes. And I did not feel that was available.

And then I did something else. I was like, well, I can’t put a book together and then tell everybody to just go use that because now I haven’t done the personalized part. So, there’s actually a QR code in there where people have access to coaches. If this is super popular, we don’t have enough coaches. Like, I got Functional Medicine Coaching Academy and I’m like, “All right, guys, we have tons of coaches.” So, let’s all use this together to be able to get out there and recognize if you are a coach and you’re listening to this, this book is your tool to be able to work with someone. Because the medical side of it, the information is in there and so it’s totally within your scope of practice to help somebody as they go through this and really pay attention to the insights it’s presenting.

Dr. Sandi: Well, I think it’s brilliant. I’m so excited for the book. And you’re just such a bright light in this space, and it’s just been such a pleasure and an honor to know you. I know you’re a big supporter of health coaches and FMCA, so we’re very excited for your work, for your book, and what’s to come. So, where can people find you, and where can they find the book?

Ashley: Thank you. Well, hopefully everywhere. So, maybe I should frame it… If you can’t find my book, please let me know because I’m hoping it’s everywhere. Every town, I’m going to all the local bookstores too because I love supporting them. I’m like, “Ask for Your Best Shot,” or, “When are we getting this in?” You can find it anywhere. And same with me on social. I’m @TheBetterNutritionProgram. I am @ashleykoffapproved. And I’m just so grateful for you and the work and the friendship. So, thank you so much.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you, and thank you for being our guest today. Good luck with the book. We’re a big supporter. Thanks.