Hi lovely, I'm Tess!

(Short for Quintessence Challis)

I’m an 8-time author, life and business coach, and “one degree” transformation specialist. My passion is helping people create phenomenally delicious lives and businesses, one small, doable step at a time.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked as a coach, cooking instructor, speaker, writer, and mom. I currently reside in Phoenix, Arizona with the sweetest kid on the planet (my teenage daughter Alethea), my awesome husband, and his two kids. Oh, and our fur babies, Bailey and Tika. :) These days, my work revolves mainly around “One Degree” life and business coaching, writing, and being a vegan health foodie.

The Health Stuff

For me, the health stuff started in my childhood - I grew up with a plethora of issues. I’ve been through everything from chronic illness to depression, anxiety, obesity, severe acne, constant bouts of strep throat, and more. I still remember the moment I was told I could no longer take antibiotics, because I'd taken them all so many times that I was immune to every kind on the market! In fact, I semi-recently reunited with a friend from grade school. Her memory of me was that I was always sick. She remembers being bummed that I could rarely play with her at recess, because I was absent so often.

I also had chronic headaches from age eight onward (I haven't had a headache in years, even now in my fifties!), and I began struggling with my weight at around age ten (that’s a whole other story with an interesting twist, having to do with a magazine and a club).

Being a pudgy, insecure kid has a way of ruining otherwise fun activities, let me tell you.

My struggles with weight, chronic sickness, strep throat, headaches, and acne continued until college. When I became vegan in 1991, I was healthy for a while, which cleared up the issues the antibiotics were needed for, as well as instantly clearing up some pretty embarrassing acne I'd had since high school. But then I fell prey to another disease - the "perfectionism disease”.

Becoming Vegan

Being vegan had become easy for me after the first few months (which included some stumbles), but then I began trying to be an oil-free, no-fat vegan. All of a sudden, I’d bought the idea that tofu, nuts, oils, seeds, and salt were "bad" and completely off limits due to a popular book I’d read and taken as gospel. This led me to a cycle of deprive-and-binge that lasted for many years, because I didn't know how to be healthy and trim in a way that I could realistically live with. (I love flavorful, satisfying food. Always have. Always will. Period.)

Because of my new desire to be perfect and adhere to this strict diet, I began to see food as "good" or "bad" and if I ever ate the "bad" (hello, onion rings and chocolate cake), I saw myself as bad. And, as a bad person, I had to punish myself. It was crazy behavior, really, but I’ve known waaaay too many women (and a few men) who can relate to this, which is why I've addressed this quite often in my work.

I've always loved food, but had never really learned how to let it love me back. By 1998, I was officially an obese vegan and could barely climb one flight of stairs without being out of breath. This is what led me to finally get real, make some big (yet stick-with-able) changes, and eventually develop my color-coded system, which teaches people what it taught me at the time - that we CAN eat what we like, thoroughly enJOY food, and make weight loss a delicious (vs. deprivation-based) process. I could finally lose the weight because I wasn't feeling flavor-deprived. I allowed myself to feel sated without guilt for the first time in years. That “without guilt” thing is actually pretty damn important, turns out.