Damn It Feels Good to Love Yourself – Relish Life Launches with Focus on Treating ACEs

Telehealth Structured Weight Loss Program with Mental Health at its Core

SAN DIEGO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / January 18, 2022 / Relish.Life stands out in the weight loss industry as an entirely new way to combat weight issues that plague more than half of US adults.

A Day in the Relish Life

Relish is a cutting-edge new approach to weight loss, leveraging a unique focus on mental health in addition to its fully-integrated, multi-disciplinary approach via telehealth and AI. Recognizing that weight gain and retention is a mental health issue, not a lack of willpower, Relish focuses on medically treating core drivers of addictive relationships with food: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs); adult toxic stress and trauma with the understanding that long term exposure to toxic stress during childhood and later in life, and resultant physiological changes to the brain and metabolism, are a major driving factor of weight gain.

Lighten Up! With Relish

Relish is the only weight loss program that screens for ACEs as part of its treatment protocol. To reverse the impact of ACEs and recognize the significant impact ACEs have on its health care costs, California recently enacted the ACEs Equity Act to significantly expand health insurance coverage for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) screening. The California Medical Association (CMA) co-sponsored the bill with Children Now. It applies to all healthcare service contracts, including Medi-Cal managed care plan contracts and health insurance policies issued, amended, or renewed on or after January 1, 2022. New Jersey, Alaska, and Tennessee have also served as models for statewide approaches that prevent and address ACEs and develop trauma-informed policies.

ACEs are traumatic childhood experiences that impact people of all races, cultures, and socio-economic backgrounds, including physical, emotional, sexual abuse; physical or emotional neglect; parental mental illness, substance dependence or incarceration; parental separation or divorce; and domestic violence. Research indicates that two-thirds of American adults experienced at least one ACE during their childhood.

Experiencing adversity early in life can affect a person’s health, well-being, and success into adulthood. The long-term resulting trauma stress is the root of the most common health challenges, including weight gain and obesity.

Relish Life offers physically tangible and digital connection points.

A groundbreaking study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente, released in 1998, found that adults who experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), ranging from physical and emotional abuse, and neglect to various forms of household dysfunction, insufficient duration, and intensity, had a significantly elevated risk of heart disease, diabetes, substance use disorder, smoking, poor academic achievement, and early death. It is only now that governments are starting to fully acknowledge the costs incurred to the medical system of ACEs and implementing legislation to reimburse practitioners to screen for it.

COVID-19 has brought additional attention to the impact of ACEs and trauma across the lifespan, which may be exacerbated by disruption in the lives of families; increased family stressors; income, food, and housing insecurity; social isolation; and school closures. During the pandemic, 42% of the population unintentionally gained weight.

“Relish is on a mission to flip the diet industry right side up, using groundbreaking research that ties chronic stress over past trauma to weight gain and retention,” said Relish C.E.O. Liz Dickinson. “Diets fail time and time again because they’re not addressing the root cause of the issue. Our goal is to help people shed their childhood traumas, learn effective coping strategies and empower them to live healthy, happy lives. We’re giving men and women the tools to reclaim the life that is rightfully theirs and leave their past in the past.”

Damn, it feels good to love yourself

Relish offers its weight loss solution on a monthly subscription basis, including doctor visits, medications, nutrition, fitness advice, chat support, and weekly facilitated group discussions with Master’s level therapists. The startup has brought together a team of the country’s foremost physicians on weight loss and ACEs, stress, and trauma to help achieve their mission, including Dr. Vincent J. Felitti – who has more than 50 years of internal medicine experience and extensive knowledge of childhood trauma and obesity. Dr. Felitti is the founder of Kaiser’s Positive Choice Weight Loss Clinics and co-led with the CDC on a groundbreaking ACE study of 17,500 adults.

Hand it to yourself; you deserve to Relish life.

In addition to Dr. Felitti serving as a key advisor, the best-in-class Relish team is led by Chief Executive Officer Liz Dickinson, a serial entrepreneur, technology innovator, and inventor of Mio, the world’s first wrist-worn heart rate monitor for sports; Chief Operating Officer Shannon Shearn, a serial wellness entrepreneur and founder who brings her experience and personal struggle with health as one of the world’s top circus acrobats to her fresh approach and a fresh approach to weight loss through behavioral modification and stress management; Chief Medical Officer Dr. Albert Ray, Supervising Physician of Bariatric Surgery at Kaiser and pioneer in the field of weight loss management; and Chief Behavioral Officer Dr. Brian Alman, acclaimed author of numerous books focused on stress management and weight loss.

Find your plan, and begin to Relish your life again

Since January 2021, the company has achieved several milestones, including a successful pilot with weight loss results of 10 percent in six months, setup of a fully-scalable and legally-compliant telehealth infrastructure, mass production of award-winning packaging. This soft launch generated recurring subscriptions and saw a 50 percent renewal rate in membership.

Leveraging telehealth and AI, the Relish community is always at your fingertips.

“This program is so well designed and coordinated with continuous support for all areas. I especially love the Meditations and Medical aspects of this program,” said Relish member Grace B. “I can’t say enough about this program. It’s improved my life in so many ways, and I have never felt this emotionally whole – it’s like a whole new life for me with a new set of skills and tools.”

Relish Life – Steps

Relish investors to date include Karen and Ed Zuckerberg; Todd Nelson, producer of The Biggest Loser TV franchise; Dr. Steve Gurland, co-founder of MDTV Live; and other private investors. Advisory Board members include Donald Jones, founder of Qualcomm Life; Paul Schiffner, former SVP Global Strategy and Revenue Growth for Weight Watchers; Tom Waller, SVPSVPSVP Innovation at Adidas; and Casey Santiago, Managing Partner Steel Sky Ventures and Founder of Kangu.

Relish is a new approach to weight loss that is safe, clinically proven, and effective for the long term. The infographic below discusses all of the issues that need to be considered and addressed to make a weight loss plan for life: https://relish.life/weight-loss-isnt-what-you-think.

Additional information can be found online at https://relish.life.

Press Contact:

Evan White
509.995.9105
Evan@EvanWhitePR.com

SOURCE: Relish Life

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