About Begüm Erçin

I was born in Ankara in 1982 as the second child of a mother and father who created themselves out of nothing, who are extremely hardworking, determined, and whom I have never seen get tired.

I grew up witnessing the establishment of two major companies in their fields, pioneered by my mother and father. For this reason, as you might guess, working and producing became the first and most important value I learned from my family. However, this determination and priority brought along perfectionism; some of the diseases we knocked on wood upon hearing, finally knocked on our door due to the lives they postponed and the bodies they postponed feeling. Until then, we had not realized that health should be a bigger priority than everything else.

Our first wake-up call came in 1992 with my father’s heart surgery. Although he had undergone a major heart operation at the age of 44 and had not lost his life energy even in two heart attacks, messages continued to come that he needed to change his existing lifestyle. In 1994, I remember the joy of life and the vibrancy in the eyes of a mother who was given a limited number of days to live, as if it was today. “Don’t worry, I will handle it, give me my lipstick,” she said, unaware that she was entering a very severe treatment process that would last four years. During this process, I witnessed that she never complained for a day, never gave up her happiness, never postponed her dreams, and never neglected her work, which she regarded as another child. Probably as I write these lines, she has just come out of a yoga class, preparing for the dance class she will go to in the evening.

My belief that health can only be balanced in the unity of body and mind started exactly during this period. While my mother was being treated at the MD Anderson Hospital, my sister and I voluntarily supported other Turkish patients undergoing treatment. We had many losses and many victories.

There was only one thing we clearly understood: whatever your body is signaling to you through illness, the perception of your soul and mind was the only secret to the success of the correct treatment.

During this time, health and psychology books began to replace the novels and classics that had raised me. With deep curiosity, I started reading and researching every publication I could find related to the human mind and behavioral sciences. What I enjoyed the most was telling others about it and sharing what I learned.

Due to the popularity of the department at the time and some learned facts, I completed my degree in Business Administration at Bilgi University in 2004. No matter what job I was doing, my readings and research on health and development never ended. At the same time, my effort to tell everyone around me about everything I learned continued.

One day, at a dinner, a friend’s advice, “You do this with so much love, you should do it under a professional identity and touch more people…” led me to meet my mentor, the late Hatice Yildiran, the founder of ID Consulting, in 2014. In the same year, I completed a unique training approved by ICF on awareness, development, and transformation life coaching.

In the following days, we discovered how much the nutrition of my beloved sister, who was struggling with some autoimmune diseases we had never even heard of until that day, changed the quality of her life. Although we couldn’t convince the doctors of the period, this led me to take a deeper education on nutrition, and I completed the nutrition specialization training from the Blackford Institute in England.

While this training was ongoing, Harvard Extension School started offering courses on nutrition and healthy living. The first course I took, “Myths and Paradigms of Nutrition,” taught the good/bad effects of all diet trends that have been applied or popularized to date on human health, through scientific studies. It brought a very different depth to my nutrition specialization training with the in-depth knowledge provided about the effect of what we eat on our daily well-being, mental and physical performance, and our long-term health or healing goals, and how to optimize our diet.

In a conversation with our professor from the course, I was introduced to an approach called Lifestyle Medicine Coaching. Lifestyle Medicine, a newly opened training at Harvard Extension School, adopted the coaching perspective in treatment. This approach, which significantly increased both the patient recovery rate and the doctor’s success rate, had started to become a part of medical education. “Lifestyle Medicine” can be described as the science of support practices and interventions made for the prevention and treatment of many chronic diseases (heart disease, diabetes, stroke, obesity, some neurological conditions, and some cancers) through a healthy lifestyle. It is also an evidence-based specialty that quickly connects individuals and their health goals through basic lifestyle elements, approaching traditional clinical treatment and preventive practices scientifically. It uses evidence-based coaching approach techniques, the most effective method in behavior change. Lifestyle interventions include physical activity, nutrition, sleep, stress management and resilience, relaxation/relaxation techniques, awareness of positive and negative emotional states, social connections, and chemical addictions.

In 2015, I came across the Integrative Institute of Nutrition during a period when I was eager to share this approach, which I was greatly impressed by its success rate, and all the valuable information I had learned. This school addressed over 100 different nutrition theories holistically, emphasizing the importance of high-quality, nutrient-dense foods and explaining that nutrition goes beyond food, encompassing everything that nourishes the body. I completed this training, which brought together all the education I had received so far, within 1 year with enthusiasm, and received my Health Coach certificate approved by NBHWC and ICF in March 2017.

Through IIN, I took training on Microbiota Health Specialization in 2018, Emotional Eating Psychology in 2019, and Hormone Health Specialization in 2020.

During these trainings, I completed trainings as a practitioner of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), and Positive Psychology, integrating them into my coaching processes.

 

In 2022, I earned the ICF PCC title.

Since 2018, I have been working with my clients on healthy living, weight gain/loss, prevention of chronic diseases, accelerating treatment processes and improving quality of life while working simultaneously with their existing chronic diseases and doctors.