From Hamburgers to Hormones: Vanessa Gaitlin's Coaching Journey

Back to Her: Coaching Through Perimenopause and Everything Else

What happens when your own body keeps throwing you curveballs — burnout, single motherhood, perimenopause symptoms nobody warned you about — and coaching becomes both your business and your survival tool?

Megan and Danna sit down with Vanessa Gaitlin, an IIN-trained coach (and one of Megan's earliest connections in the coaching world) who's spent over a decade rebuilding her practice around her own hormone chaos. Vanessa's coaching origin story starts with a very specific craving: hamburgers and Coca-Cola, eaten compulsively while working an exhausting corporate marketing job. A coach helped her trace that craving back to homesickness, not willpower, and Vanessa was hooked on the idea that food is never just food.

From there, her business has shifted shape again and again — emotional eating coaching, a hard niche into "no weight loss talk, ever," corporate wellness workshops, ghostwriting for a supplements brand, and a genuine burnout so severe she couldn't hold a plank or follow a friend's story. She's candid about the anxiety attack that landed her in a doctor's office, and how that crash led her into yoga, breathwork, and nervous system work almost by accident.

The back half of the conversation gets into the messier reality of perimenopause: Vanessa describes years of vaginal pain and insomnia dismissed by doctors because she was "still getting her period," and how she eventually pieced together her own answers through a menopause-focused yoga teacher, a hormone-cycle certification, and — eventually — a gynecologist who actually listened. Now she works exclusively with women in perimenopause and menopause through her seven-week group program, Back to Her, blending food, nervous system work, and community accountability.

Vanessa also shares her clearest business advice: niche into what you've personally lived (not just studied), always have three offers ready to go, and market what your client will gain — not what you're willing to give. It's a grounded, funny, occasionally TMI conversation about what it actually looks like to build a coaching business while your own hormones keep rewriting the rules.

Chapters:

00:00 Meet Vanessa Gaitlin

01:44 Coaching Menopause Wellness

03:54 From Corporate to Coaching

15:32 Burnout Recovery and New Niche

30:10 Menopause Wake Up Call

31:04 Hormone Education Overload

34:55 Niche Marketing Newsletters

45:04 Group Program Offers Wrap

Mentioned in this episode:

Becoming a Health Coach is a proud member and production of the SwissCast Network

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