For Marielle Styles, health coaching started close to home. “What drew me to health coaching was a personal journey,” she says. After years of living with anxiety and depression, she wanted to find a different way. Today Marielle is a PREKURE Certified Metabolic Health Coach and PREKURE Lead Coach and Coaching Facilitator, specialising in keto and low-carb health. She runs her own coaching practice from Papamoa in the Bay of Plenty and works as a Metabolic Nutrition Coach with Reversal NZ. From the classroom to a new way of living Marielle grew up on a game farm near the Kruger National Park in Southern Africa. She graduated as a specialist teacher, with an honours degree in teaching children with learning difficulties, and spent 12 years in the teaching profession before moving to New Zealand with her husband and four daughters. The turning point came in 2016. “I was tired of being overweight, always feeling tired, and seeing my health get worse,” she says. “I didn’t want to grow old feeling this way.” She began exploring nutrition as a sustainable way to improve her health and lose weight, and came across the ketogenic diet. She changed her whole lifestyle. “My life has changed enormously by bringing in exercise and joy and great food, whole nutritionally balanced food,” she says. “Just finding a different way of life.” Building the science behind the lived experience Marielle’s own results led her to retrain. Through PREKURE she qualified as a certified Metabolic Nutrition Coach, giving her a scientific foundation to match what she had already lived. She has since added further keto training with internal medicine physician Dr Annette Bosworth, and a further certification in Nutritional Science. She opened her health coaching practice in 2020. Through mariellestyles.co.nz she works with clients who want to improve their energy, lose weight and build habits that last. She also works as a Metabolic Nutrition Coach with Reversal NZ, a lifestyle medicine clinic where she supports clients alongside a medical team. It is the integrated, team-based model PREKURE trains coaches to work in. And as a PREKURE Lead Coach and Coaching Facilitator, she now helps train the next generation of health coaches. No one-size-fits-all Marielle sees health coaching as part of where medicine is heading. “Having a health coach by your side is absolutely one of the ways that medicine is going,” she says. “We’re working very much in personalised medicine.” That means treating each client as a whole person. “With everybody being as different as they are, we don’t just use a one-size-fits-all approach,” she explains. Instead, she tailors programmes to the individual. She has a special interest in helping people improve their metabolic health through keto and low-carb eating and wider lifestyle change. She works in small, manageable steps, and describes her role in private coaching as an accountability partner: “a Keto Coach in your pocket.” Watching clients blossom Living this way herself shapes how Marielle coaches. “Being able to live this lifestyle and really understand what it means to live a healthy, productive life in every sense of the word, that excites me beyond measure,” she says. “I watch clients just blossom in front of me as they find health and wellness.” Marielle offers three main programmes:
- Private Coaching: one-on-one sessions tailored to each client’s needs and pace
- Consistently Keto NZ: a self-paced online course covering the science of a ketogenic lifestyle and practical tips for daily life
- Momentum Plan: accountability and support for people who have done keto for a while and want to keep improving
