Have you shed enough pounds for the coming season?

Jose Anton Villablanca de Mendoza is a Holistic Lifestyle Coach.

In four weeks, it’s going to be a month of merrymaking again. You know what that means: Lechon, cakes, drinks—everything that will help increase the wealth of cardiologists around the country.

I have no idea how I will lose weight in time for my sister’s wedding in a couple of months. In desperation, I have started lobbying for a “fat wedding,” i.e., no one under 150 pounds will be invited.

No one seems to be taking this idea seriously. My designer, the charming and chic Carla Guiao-Yuson, wants me to look less frumpy and bare more skin, that I have started to panic.

Dreading to hear my Tito Jessie’s comments of “Wow, legs!” when he sees my bare arms, I’ve hired a personal trainer. But with all my travels and late nights, I keep missing training sessions.

So our family friend, Dollie de Mendoza, introduced me to her son, Jose Anton Villablanca de Mendoza, a personal trainer from California with 10 years experience who has taken training beyond the usual and has become a lifestyle coach.

“What is that?” I ask.

“I started out as a personal trainer but got limited results with clients,” Anton explains. “Then I realized that lifestyle change plays a big factor in achieving results.”

So instead of just meeting with clients for training sessions at the gym, he guides his clients as they change their lifestyle—from nutrition to stress management. With his program, he is able to guide his clients not only during the average three hours a week of gym time but all 168 hours of the week.

He starts by guiding clients with what they eat. While not a nutritionist, as a certified holistic lifestyle coach from the Corrective Holistic Exercise Kinesiology (C.H.E.K.) Institute in California, he is able to guide clients into eating according to their lifestyle and according to their nutritional needs. He stresses there is not one diet that will work for everyone, e.g. the Atkins diet may not be ideal for executives or the Cohen diet may not be ideal for marathon runners. Instead, you need to find the right diet for your body type, health status and your lifestyle, he explains.

Through his guidance, you may be able to find not only the best diet for you to lose excess fat but the diet that will also make you more effective at work.

But the training doesn’t stop with diet and exercise. Stress management and sleep play a large factor in the wellbeing of a person as well. So as a life coach, Anton will guide you on how to reduce stress and get better sleep.

Sometimes, we don’t even realize we are already under stress.

“Being sedentary can be stressful,” he explains. “Exercising too much also causes stress.” Can you imagine being so proud of exercising an extra hour, only to learn that in the end, it will not give you optimal results?

He explains there are various forms of stress: Physical; nutritional, like not having the proper diet; chemical; mental; electro-magnetic; and even thermal stress, usually for those who live in countries with four seasons. Anton, through his lifestyle coaching program, can help you identify the causes of stress in your daily life and guide you to avoid these.

It makes sense. My father, who had B-Cell Non-Hodgkins lymphoma, was always feeling very cold and having chills prior to his diagnosis. The doctors all thought it was viral. It wasn’t. It was stress, caused in large part by an evil land-grabber disrespecting my grandmother’s property in the province, manifesting itself in chills.

Anton also stresses the importance of sleep. “This means getting quality sleep and not just the number of hours that you sleep,” he says, sharing that your body should “ideally follow the rise and fall of the sun.”

After guiding his clients on nutrition, stress management and sleep, he goes back to food. This part will really help in terms of weight loss.

He explains that fat is stored energy so if you train your body to expect food to come every four hours, it should stop storing fat. He guides his clients so that they observe the “gaps” before each meal.

Finally, he will guide clients on digestion and detoxification. It’s an interesting process that he uses because usually, when people diet, the detox comes first.

Anton does not advise detox unless his clients improve their nutrition, stress management and sleep. He also notes that your body can be intoxicated not only by alcohol and bad food but by what you inhale: Pollution, perfume, hairspray. He guides clients on how to detox holistically.

He will also guide you on identifying signs that you are not digesting food properly and if so, what foods to incorporate in your diet to aid and improve digestion.

Most importantly, he stresses the importance of developing good habits. His program requires a minimum of three months commitment because his studies have shown that it takes 60 days to develop a habit. He will meet with clients at least once a week, depending on their schedule, to monitor improvements and continuously guide them.

To spread the word on living holistically, he now also gives seminars to groups. He happily notes that companies now are becoming more concerned about the health of their employees so he holds seminars for companies where executives and employees are eager, or at least open, to a lifestyle change.

He is holding a Holistic Nutrition Seminar on Nov. 11, Saturday, at 4 p.m. at the Rockwell Club. (Call 09171366868 to reserve a slot.)

To be honest, while I am very much inspired, I am afraid to commit to the lifestyle change. I think you will need to be in that mind-set for this to work. In the meantime … I think I’ll just continue to lobby for the fat wedding!

For inquiries about personal training, other seminars or his lifestyle coaching program, visit https://www.facebook.com/holisticvilla or message Jose Villablanca (Anton de Mendoza) on Facebook.