Episode 133 – Plants and Pilates with Hope Pedraza

In this episode, I talk to Hope Pedraza about plant focused nutrition and pilates. She shares with us her journey to discover a more plant focused diet. And how pilates can improve everyones long term health and wellbeing.

About Hope Pedraza

Hope Pedraza is a Certified Holistic Nutritionist, a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner as well the founder of inBalance, a pilates based fitness studio franchise.

What is functional medicine?

Hope is a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, that means that she is trained to look at the person as a whole. She has been trained to used diagnostic tools such as stool, blood or hormone tests and apply the results into a protocol that will help her clients get to the route cause of their illnesses.

How did you become plant based?

In her youth Hope found that she was suffering with IBS, she also had lots of allergies. After doing some research she became plant focused in her early 20’s and soon found that not only did her IBS clear up, so her allergies.

Hope was a dancer in high school and then trained as a pilates instructor and taught pilates when she was in college as a side hustle. Once she started to understand the power of functional nutrition she realised that there was a synergy between the two and integrated her practises.

She describes her diet as ‘plant focused’ as she does occasionally eat fish, and she encourages us all to be more open to eating a more plant focused diet, with small amounts of really great protein if we still want it. Her goal is for everyone to eat 30 different plant based foods each week.

Hopeful and Wholesome

InBalance is a planned franchise of pilates based studios in the US, and despite the set-backs faced over the last couple of years the plans to expand are taking shape, there is a growing desire to find quality and niche studios that specialise and offer expert guidance and she plans to satisfy that demand.