This article was originally published in Boro Magazine in January 2018.
Holistic health coach Kristina Borza is a proponent of self-care, whole foods — and leaps of faith.
To Borza, these are not just buzzwords, but ideals which have guided her life, and which she now shares with her clients to help them make long-lasting lifestyle changes too. A former corporate digital marketer, Borza decided to pursue her passion for wellness, and took a course at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition last July.
This led to her quitting her job to focus on a career in helping others with their health.
“It was time for me to get in alignment,” Borza said “Now I have much more freeness of speech to talk about making big changes and how those leaps of faith can absolutely work for you.”
As a holistic health coach, Borza takes all aspects of a client’s lifestyle into account to create a personalized plan for them to reach their goals. This can involve weight loss, career, relationships, stress management, diet and more.
She said people crave this type of discussion about their lives since doctors don’t often give patients enough time to get a holistic view of their lifestyle.
Her particular focus is diet and finding out which foods work best for someone’s body. At age 11, Borza discovered she was gluten intolerant. A modified diet solved a host of her own health issues, which piqued her interest in nutrition.
“I was raised with this awareness of what I eat could affect how I felt,” Borza said.
Borza said if a client says they want to try a certain diet or food modification, she always asks why to determine if it’s because they want to lose weight and think a program will help, or they’re suffering from a food sensitivity. She said she is “agnostic” when it comes to popular diets like paleo or Whole30.
“People know intuitively what works for them,” she said. “My job is to help them cut through the confusion."
Borza also questions new clients when defining their goals, to open up the conversation. She also leads clients through an exercise using a circle of life graph which is divided in several sections, each are slices of circle that connect to something in person’s life like spirituality, relationships, joy, education, physical activity, socializing and more. She uses that as a visual way of seeing someone’s lifestyle, and where more balance is needed.
Borza’s role is also to create a plan of action for clients to reach measurable goals and hold them accountable — they can call her to help stay on track and she usually meets clients once every week or every two weeks.
She said she offers supermarket store tours to help clients cut through marketing that labels foods as healthy that aren’t. For example, she said when something is labeled as gluten free, many people think the product is healthier, but it’s likely to contain excess sugar and gums. She also encourages Astoria clients to sign up for CSA, which is available in fall and spring and connects people with fresh food from farms in Long Island.
To keep herself accountable when she began coaching, she started a wellness-focused Instagram account, @kristina.wellness, to connect with the community. Through that, she met her first client, who was based in Astoria and suffered from a sugar addiction.
After Borza led her through a sugar detox, she not only lost weight she wanted to lose, but also ended a bad relationship and moved into a new apartment.
“It really opened my eyes that his work is amazing and can create huge shifts for people,” she said.
The Instagram account also connected Borza to two women who did the Integrative program and started a group of holistic health coaches called Embody Wellness Company. Borza joined, and said being involved with a bigger entity helps her find more clients and provide better service.
Through Embody, she has helped host events in the Hamptons this summer. In early January, she hosted a Women's Wellness Workshop on holistic self care at Always Astoria studio, where she knows the owner and will be able to instruct classes in pilates, which she was recently certified to teach. She said being from Astoria has helped her business because people already know and trust her.
“Having that network built in already has been helpful in building my platform,” she said.
Borza, who grew up in Astoria, said she remembers when the only place she could buy gluten free bread was at one health store in Manhattan. Back then, the neighborhood was predominantly Greek families, which included Borza, who is half-Greek. There has been an influx of young professionals which has shifted the composition of the neighborhood, she said.
“Young professionals have a different set of goals and aspirations than a mom or other people I might work with,” she said.
She encourages her clients, especially the young professionals, to try a digital detox, which involves taking a break from your phone and social media, creating space in your day without technology. She said social media can be fake and set unreasonable expectations for people.
“[Taking a break from technology is] becoming harder and harder, but I think people need it more and more,” Borza said. She expects to help clients with this more in 2018.
She recommends turning off technology and hour before bedtime. Constant exposure to light emitted from technology can inhibit sleep, so beginning a ritual of limiting that can improve sleep, an in turn, overall wellness, she said.
She said the response to a new population in the neighborhood has made it easier to live a healthy lifestyle.
“The cool thing about Astoria is that because of this shift, we’ve gotten a lot more businesses that are more in alignment with the work I’m doing — restaurants, business, CSA, all of that is here now where it wasn’t in the past,” Borza said. "For a client in Astoria, it’s never been a better time do this work because they have those resources locally.”
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