My name is Denise Wogan. I am a coach helping you stop the fight with food and live the life you want. My passion is helping women to be the very best versions of themselves – to show up, grow in self-belief and confidence, and consistently take the action that they need to take to achieve their goals with ease.
And it all starts with their relationship with what they eat. I love helping women who feel their lives are STUCK, plain and simple and for whom food, their weight and their body have become a full time, unhealthy, preoccupation. I love helping these women because that was once me.
With qualifications in nutrition, intuitive eating, breath work, eating disorders and body image healing, and 5+ years experience as a coach, I bring you a super flexible approach that meets your individual requirements.
My priority is our relationship so that you can safely explore the thoughts, feelings that are keeping you stuck. And it is a non negotiable that I communicate in a way that ensures you hear what you need to hear.
I continue to meet my learning needs and am pursuing my BsC in Counselling & Psychotherapy. I am smashing my training goals, venturing into new areas of performance I never knew I had in me. I am still managing to co-exist with 3 kids, a dog and a husband, the toughest ride of all. I jump into the wave of emotion every day as much as I jump into the baltic Irish Sea. My qualifications are as quirky and random as myself. As my Dad said of me on my wedding day, I like to take the scenic route wherever I go.
If you are looking for support, if you are not living your dream, if you don’t want to make this journey to feeling healthy any harder on yourself, know I am here for you.
I was at a point in life that perhaps you can relate to. I had a busy job and full time duties as a mum of 3. I was pushing through, lacking in motivation, feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and beginning to wonder: “Shit, is this it?!”
And my body was keeping the score. I constantly got sick, I struggled with IBS, psoriasis, anxiety and a classic case of perfectionism as I tried to fix things.
Controlling what I ate became an obsession. I was checking off the lists of dietary changes to stop the IBS, seeking out the supplements to cure psoriasis, taking the remedies to resolve the bloating and running the roads away from myself.
Everywhere I looked I was told food was the answer to all of my problems. And in many ways it was easy at the start: I had rules to follow, perfect meals to make and more to do. I became a good student and was doing all the things.
But because I was so convinced I was doing it right I didn’t notice what was really happening.
How I watched every morsel I ate and judged every morsel everyone else ate too. How I really wanted to have the cake but it had to be… pleasure free.
How I didn’t trust food, I didn’t trust myself.
How I avoided hunger because I believed intermittent fasting was the answer.
How I walked myself and my family to 10 restaurants to find the perfect healthy one only to end up secretly wishing we went to the first with the yummy burger.
I didn’t notice that in all the doing, I wasn’t feeling any better, in fact I was creating a bigger problem. I was nowhere near the calm feeling I wanted, the relief that I had figured it out and I could relax and trust the process.
It’s not that the food advice I had gotten was wrong. It was that the person working with me did not see or hear me. I wish the people offering me health advice had seen what was really happening: the weight loss, the stress, the severe restriction, the pain.
I was blind to what I needed to do to help myself. My body was tired, it needed love and compassion, a rest and I was asking it to do more. I help my clients today to reframe these insidious thoughts that self-care is selfish.
There was a turning point though in all this that brings me to where I am today.
I was on holiday in Spain, covered head to toe in red blotchy scaly psoriasis. I was roasting, hiding behind my long clothes to cover my skin. I looked around me, at people who were just living. It was there that it hit me and I realised: I was living to eat, not eating to live.
And so the seed was planted to give up the fight with food. The reality was dawning - I didn’t want to be the person who could eat the perfect diet if it meant I gave up on living.
That was the day I knew I would never be able to tell people what to eat to earn my living. That was the day I changed inside forever, because I was no longer afraid to see what was keeping me stuck.
I want to work so you can be confident as you are, and allow yourself to stretch and grow. I want you to start becoming more of yourself so that you take actions because you want to care for yourself not because you need to.
Life is busy, money is tight and the energy tank is always running on empty, I see you. It is so easy to put our health on the back burner. It breaks my heart when I see my old self in my clients eyes; they know what they want to do but just can’t seem to stay doing it. It breaks my heart to see you pour money and time into quick fix solutions that you know are keeping you stuck.
That’s why I have made it my mission to be the best non-diet coach Ireland has seen. My job is not to preach to you to eat peas and chia seeds. No. You need someone who is going to help you figure out how to change the habits, behaviours, actions that you take so you get a better result. As my mentor said to me, hard doesn’t have to be hard, you can find a way to make it easy by changing what you think.
Now I help people slow down so in the end they speed up. My clients are getting promotions, being role models for their children, family and friends, are wearing swimsuits again, are not worrying about what others think and above all making space for the things that really matter.
You could never get that from a meal plan! My greatest joy is teaching you how to say goodbye to endless dieting, to really understand yourself and get you started on your journey of practising intuitive eating.
Anti-diet does not mean anti-health, so my approach helps you to discover the behaviours that are health supportive and easy to implement consistently.
In the end you will wake up with more energy, joy and confidence in your food and movement choices. And because we live in a real world, I don’t sugar coat it, everyday life and YOU won’t be perfect but you can respond differently.
