Unwrap Your Wellness with Coach Melody McClellan

Coach Melody McClellan

Unwrap Your Wellness

By Monica Montgomery

Photos Provided by Claxco Media

Americans are among the most morbidly obese globally. Still, we spend more than any country per capita on weight loss gimmicks. Melody McClellan, of St. Louis, MO, is a wife, mother, and former pharmaceutical sales rep, and ten years ago, she would have never imagined herself helping others in physical health and wellness. Today, she can’t imagine doing anything else.

As her clients call her, Coach Melody is an outstanding Health and Wellness with twenty-plus years of experience. “After years as a pharmaceutical sales rep, I realized there is a huge lack of education around nutrition and mental wellness,” Melody explained. “I saw the bags of medication growing, but nobody was actually getting better.”

In October 2013, Unwrap You was born. “I was at a turning point in my life. My kids were older, and I started to feel like I wanted to do something more with my life,” Melody shares. “I studied wellness and nutrition and started trying to show people that there was a better, long-term solution to a healthier way of life. When I started as ‘Coach Melody,’ I thought it was just about helping people lose weight. I quickly learned that there is a lot more to this process. It’s about the individual’s mindset and prevention. You have to consider what people have been through, what mental baggage they carry, and overall be willing to meet people where they are on their wellness journey.”

Melody was born in St. Louis but moved with her mother and brother to Los Angeles when she was ten. The fitness and body image bug didn’t hit her until age sixteen. “I wasn’t the healthiest kid growing up. What I mean is I wasn’t into sports and athletics. I think it was around sixteen that I got into health and nutrition,” Melody admitted. “I started watching what I ate and changing some habits. When I saw the results, it motivated me to continue exploring what a healthier me looked like. Like most people, I tried different fad diets and meal plans. But that’s how things started for me.”

The one thing Melody says she has always loved was sales. As a pharmaceutical sales professional, she gained valuable insights about various commodities. “There were a lot of medical options for people who want to get healthier, but as I thought about it, I realized that they weren’t actually getting healthier. They were masking the problem.” Melody found a way to help people holistically live better lives while doing something she enjoyed. She would advocate and teach the world how to create lifestyle change that’s sustainable for optimum health and well-being.

“I was told that your passion is something you would do for free. Marketing and sales are my passion. Now I get to combine that with another love of mine, and it’s a win-win,” Melody explained. “Now I feel like I can effect change, especially for youth and communities who wouldn’t normally have access to the information I’m providing.” Coach Melody has been able to transfer her corporate knowledge and training to empower transformations within corporations, executives, youth, and chronic patients in health systems.

Coach Melody’s health and wellness platform has caught on in a big way. Five years ago, she left her corporate sales position and went full time as a Health and Wellness Transformation Strategist. Make no mistake, this wasn’t just a good idea. Melody wanted to make sure she was adequately prepared to succeed at changing how people viewed their mental health and wellness. “When I started, I wanted to be as informed as possible because you only have one chance to make a good impression. The last thing you want is to be uninformed about the root cause of the illnesses you are trying to prevent,” she shares. “As a pharmaceutical sales rep, you are well-trained on the latest medications and their indications. Having that foundational knowledge of the different disease states have proving beneficial along with obtaining a holistic certification in nutrition and mental wellness.”

One of the things Coach Melody tries to shed light on when it comes to living a healthier lifestyle is there are no quick fixes. “I have learned that drugs don’t make you healthy. They are made to control chronic conditions. What I teach in my program is you can come off many maintenance medications, but it won’t happen with the snap of a finger,” she explained. “One of the key phrases I always use is, ‘You are creating a lifestyle change.’ Exploring those changes and their impact is a big part of what I do. It’s all about helping people change their mindset. All change starts in the mind. It’s hard at first, but the body will follow once you change your thoughts. It’s hard at first, but with the proper education, strategies, and expert to keep you accountable it becomes easier to incorporate lifestyle change that is sustainable.”

Sometimes, we encounter people who offer advice or support in an area they have only clinical experience in. Coach Melody’s wisdom was gained firsthand. “A big part of why I started focusing on mental and physical wellness was because after I had my children, my body didn’t snap back the way I thought it should have,” Melody shared. “I’ll be honest and say I had difficulty losing the post-pregnancy weight. You see those women who have babies, and boom, they look like nothing happened. It didn’t work like that for me.”

Struggling to figure it out, Melody went on a personal wellness journey. “What I learned as I worked toward a sustainable healthy lifestyle was it was less about diet and exercise and more about portion control, what I was eating when I was eating it, and why,” she explained. “While on my journey, I did participate in a weight loss program, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that their plan wouldn’t work for me.”

When she started the business, she was only working it part-time, but the pressure of being a wife, a mother, a sales rep, and a health and wellness coach started to take its toll. “I want people to know that the program I am prescribing to them is the same one that saved me when I was in a fragile place,” Melody shared. “With home and family life, work, and the part-time business, I became so stressed that my body began to break down. I suffered hair loss, and my skin started breaking out. I wasn’t taking care of myself the way I should have, and my body was reacting. I had to make the decision to put my health first. I had been preparing the business for about five years, so I took my exit when my company offered a voluntary separation which included a severance package.”

It’s been over twenty years since Coach Melody started her personal journey. In that time, she has maintained the weight loss and enjoyed the healthier side of life she offers her clients.

In the beginning, Melody handled individual clients, but as the Unwrap You movement has grown over the years, Coach Melody has found a way to get her message out to a broader audience. “As I explained before, when I started, I thought health and wellness looked like a personal trainer encouraging an unmotivated individual towards a personal goal. But it is so much bigger than that,” Melody explains. “Understanding the body, mind, and spirit aspects of health and wellness made me want to do more to reach people around the world. Before, I would work with one client for one hour. Now, I can reach six hundred people, speaking and improving workplace productivity in that same hour. It is a way to maximize outcomes and impact more people globally. So now I focus on corporate wellness programs, speaking engagements promoting a healthy mindset, and youth wellness and life skills programs.”

A healthy lifestyle increases productivity, makes you feel better, and improves mobility. It is not about a number on a scale. It’s about what’s weighing you down and making small improvements over time that are substantial.

One of Coach Melody’s programs is the Fam Fun 3K Walk, held annually in September. “September is Childhood Obesity Month, and for the past seven years, I’ve hosted the Fam Fun 3k Walk in Lincoln Park in East St. Louis, Illinois. This event raises funds and awareness of childhood obesity. This is a family fun event, and proceeds go to youth and family-driven charities,” she explained. “It is a great time for a great cause. There are various resources, activities, and fun for everyone. The great part is that we have given over thirty thousand dollars back to the community in the last three years.” In the seven years since the Fam Fun 3k Walk started, it has reached twenty-five states and three continents.

Coach Melody wants to stress that one size does not fit all when creating a successful wellness program. “My goal is to create an experience with every company, organization, youth, or leader I contract with that leads to results. You can’t take the cookie-cutter approach when creating a wellness program,” she says passionately. “It’s important to me as a consultant to know what you are trying to accomplish, how you are trying to get it done, and what financial investment you want to make to see this happen.”

As Coach Melody looks toward the future, she sees herself moving toward advocacy in the space of underserved communities. “I have had the opportunity to discuss cultural competence in front of the Illinois Senate and the House of Representatives. My point was that it’s hard to understand what people go through when you haven’t walked a mile in their shoes. My life experiences qualify me to speak to and for people on either side of the line. I was raised by a single mother in areas we now identify as food deserts because the people didn’t have access to grocery stores. I was that struggling college student who had to check the couch for loose change to buy food or gas. Now, I have everything I need and live comfortably, but those experiences make me relatable. My sensitivity to my community positions me to help find a long-term solution to providing nutrition-based education that will allow us to live healthier and more productive lives globally.”

Coach Melody wants people to understand that after years of walking this path, she’s learned that anyone can do it. “I don’t care if you are eight or sixty-eight. Everyone can create a strategic wellness plan to achieve their health and wellness goals. You are never too old to invest in you. Start with loving yourself to life. Are you ready for the Unwrap You Experience”

www.unwrapyou.com