Darja Ribarič:
Editor’s Six
HOLISTIC HEALTH COACH AND DOLPHIN RESEARCHER
from hot flashes, to breathlessness, mood swings, depression, hair loss, dry skin and more. Our coaching helps when the physiological changes seem overwhelming. The coaching is individual and directly managing the symptoms by simple behavioural adjustments as well learning about right daily rhythms of eating, exercising and reducing stress. The end result is a balanced body with lessening or eliminating perimenopausal symptoms.
Darja Ribarič talks to HTM about her work combining health and wellbeing coaching with research into dolphins… Tell me a bit about yourself and your work I am a biologist and I have an MPhil in physiology, based in Slovenia. I have a rather unusual twotrack career. I have a specialist hormone imbalance health coaching business, HEALTHIA® Coaching. This work helps to support my other role; I’ve been researching bottlenose dolphins since 2002. Dolphin research is very expensive, so 70% of the revenue from HEALTHIA® goes directly to support my dolphin conservation work.
How does hormone imbalance affect perimenopausal women? In the perimenopause, sex hormones decline, leading to physiological changes as the interplay of oestrogen and progesterone is stopped. Both hormones affect a wide range of functions in the body, and there are around 34 different symptoms of menopause
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Tell me about your work with dolphins and the similarities with women approaching menopause It is unusual in the animal kingdom for animals to live well beyond their reproductive years. Dolphins are special in this. Dolphin offspring has little chance to survive without care, so the mother often entrusts them mostly to her own mother, who plays a vital evolutionary role in ensuring the survival of the descendant generation. That’s the reason why female dolphins lives were prolonged and why they experience menopause, just like human females.
YOU & YOUR HEALTH
HEALTHIA® HORMONES: For perimenopausal women and people with hormonal imbalance: being stressed, having glycaemic stress, obesity etc. HEALTHIA® FOOD: Learning about the right ‘fuel’ for our bodies as they change. HEALTHIA® DETOX and CONTROLLED WEIGHT LOSS: A follow up module for people looking to lose weight and maintain healthier lifestyles. I’m also very excited about a new programme we’re running in May and October. It’s a week-long retreat for menopausal women, providing coaching on managing hormonal changes and our nutritional needs. We’ll also be going out with the boat for some hands on experience in dolphin observation.
How did you become interested in menopause? I was quite upset by some of the changes that happened to me in perimenopause. I therefore went through what I knew about menopausal physiology from the university onwards and my former job in the pharmaceutical sector. Once I figured it out, it was quite easy to implement the reachable changes and be healthy again. The dolphin research inspired me even more to help people with my acquired knowledge. So the goal of HEALTHIA® is: people come to help themselves to be healthy and by doing so, they directly help in dolphin conservation. n
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You can find out more about Darja’s work and HEALTHIA® coaching at www.healthiacoach.com
What can we learn from this? That we’re not the only living beings experiencing the natural changes in middle age! Dolphins experience some other similarities to us like stress and pressures that mostly human poses on them. Pollution and noise are such examples. They may therefore even develop similar diseases to ours.
Tell me a bit more about your coaching work I offer online one-to-one coaching which is very flexible in terms of time and location. There are three core services:
HOLISTIC THERAPIST 2016
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