Forest Hills Business Changes Lifestyles through Wellness Planning

Will Clower has some simple words of advice for those striving to be healthier in the new year—eat real food.

The local author and wellness coach has published two books and regularly helps people in the region change their lifestyles. With books called “The French Don’t Diet” and “The Fat Fallacy,” Clower of began his own health discoveries in France.

“My background is in neuroscience and after I got my degree from Emory, I got a position in France to do research on the brain,” Clower said. “I saw that the people there are healthy, they live longer, and they eat the best food in the world.”

Clower completed a dietary cultural comparison between France and the United States.

“I just thought, how do you ‘Rosetta Stone’ what they do so we can make it work for us?” he said. “After that, there was more and more demand along these lines and that’s how I got pulled in and that’s what I am doing all the time.”

His health advice is simple and straightforward—eat food.

“Here in our culture, we are great at lots of things—one of them is that we fake it,” Clower said. “We have strawberry flavoring with eight organic chemicals, synthetic fats—just because it looks like a cherry doesn’t mean it’s a cherry. Just because it looks like food, doesn’t mean that it’s food.”

Healthy cultures have several different cuisines, and while they are diverse and many, one thing ties them all together—all are authentic foods.

“The other thing to do is to love your food,” Clower said. “If you love your food, then you taste it. If you love your food, you don’t eat it in five minutes.”

Also, loving what you eat means choosing higher quality foods.

“In healthy cultures, you love your food,” he said. “Here, you get in and you get out—that is gobbling. That relationship we have with our food is disordered and it’s a driver for our weight and health problems.”

Through his personal work based in Forest Hills on Ardmore Boulevard, Clower helps to reshape attitudes about food through working with different corporations throughout the area, providing programming that includes a Mediterranean diet, a holiday program, a grocery store tour, cooking for health and a seminar series. The programs are reimbursed through Health America insurance.

“We are a sick nation and we think about the health costs right now—about 75 percent of all of the health costs in this country come from lifestyle changes,” Clower said. “If they made those changes, controlled portions and ate real food, 75 percent of those costs would go away.”

For more information, e-mail info@willclower.com or visit www.willclower.com.