Personalized Wellness Coaching for a Healthier Life
Reduce your risk of chronic disease, strengthen your daily habits, and take a more active role in your long-term well-being. Our evidence-informed wellness coaching provides practical support built around your health goals, lifestyle, values, and readiness for change.
About Us
A Legacy of Helping People Help Themselves
Heartbeats Life Center was founded in New Orleans in 1983 by Keith C. Ferdinand, MD, and Daphne P. Ferdinand, PhD, RN. It became nationally recognized for combining medical care with patient education, exercise and dance classes, nutrition education, motivation, and community empowerment.
After sustaining severe damage during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Heartbeats Life Center was reestablished in 2026 with a renewed focus on personalized health coaching and education.
Today, under the direction of Dr. Daphne Ferdinand, the center helps adults connect medical recommendations with realistic daily action. Whether you want to improve cardiovascular health, manage risk factors, build better routines, or feel more confident discussing your needs with healthcare practitioner, our health and wellness coach services meet you with compassion, experience, and practical guidance.
Gain Sustainable, Game-Changing Results
Health information alone does not always make change easier. Lasting progress often requires a clear plan, consistent encouragement, and strategies that account for your routines, responsibilities, environment, and challenges.
Our coaching process helps you:
Clarify the health goals that matter most to you.
Turn broad recommendations into achievable next steps.
Identify habits and barriers affecting your progress.
Build confidence when communicating with healthcare practitioner.
Create routines you can continue independently.
Transformative Health and Wellness Coach Services
Cardiovascular Health Coaching Reducing Chronic Disease Risk
Improving heart health can feel overwhelming, especially when several risk factors are involved. Our coaching helps you focus on realistic, manageable changes that support healthier blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, weight, movement, sleep, and stress levels.
Together, we create a personalized action plan that fits your lifestyle, priorities, and current health needs. The goal is to help you feel more informed, more confident, and better prepared to make lasting choices that support your long-term well-being.
Men’s Health and Wellness
Men often carry health concerns quietly or delay seeking support because of busy schedules, uncertainty, or discomfort asking for help. Our men’s health coaching provides a respectful, judgment-free space to talk openly about energy, stress, nutrition, preventive care, physical activity, and healthy aging.
The approach is collaborative and practical. Rather than telling you what to do, we help you identify changes that feel realistic, build confidence, and create healthier habits you can maintain over time.
Women’s Health and Wellness
A woman’s health needs can change across every stage of life. Our coaching offers compassionate, personalized support for hormonal changes, perimenopause, menopause, postmenopausal health, energy, sleep, mood, metabolism, and healthy aging.
You will receive practical guidance that helps you better understand your body, prepare for conversations with your healthcare practitioner, and build supportive habits around nutrition, movement, stress management, and long-term wellness.
Coaching Support While Taking GLP-1 Medications
GLP-1 medications can be one part of a broader health plan, but lasting progress also depends on the habits you build along the way. Our coaching provides practical, nonjudgmental support for nutrition, movement, mindset, goal setting, and accountability while you follow your prescribing practitioner guidance.
Together, we focus on realistic changes that support your well-being now and help you maintain healthier routines over time.
Gain Empowerment Over Dependency
Looking for a Health Coach Who Pushes You to Live Your Best?
Finding the right health coach near me is about finding someone who listens, respects your experiences, and understands how medical recommendations must work within your actual routines. Each session is shaped around your needs, with thoughtful conversation, practical education, and achievable action steps that are executable in everyday life.
Get Support Wherever You Are
Our health coaching services are available through private virtual sessions and small-group programs, making it accessible regardless of your location or schedule. Group coaching also creates opportunities to learn and grow alongside people working toward similar goals.
On-site programs may be available for organizations interested in bringing health education and coaching directly to their employees or communities.
Meet the Coaches
Daphne P. Ferdinand, PhD, RN
Certified Health Coach and Cardiovascular Health Educator
Dr. Daphne Ferdinand is a New Orleans native, Certified Health Coach, Diabetes Prevention Program Lifestyle Coach, and healthcare professional trained in functional nutrition. She brings more than 40 years of cardiovascular nursing experience to her coaching practice.
Her work helps clients bridge the gap between healthcare recommendations and everyday life. She supports adults seeking to prevent chronic disease, improve nutrition, regain energy, strengthen self-advocacy, and become more confident health decision-makers.
Dr. Ferdinand has authored and co-authored peer-reviewed publications addressing cardiovascular disparities, hypertension and diabetes management, metabolic syndrome, nutrition, and community-based disease prevention. She has also contributed to community advisory boards supporting research participation and stronger academic-community partnerships.
As an LSU AgCenter Certified Advanced Master Gardener, she also promotes gardening and greater access to fresh fruits and vegetables as practical pathways to healthier communities.
Kamau Ferdinand, BA, MA
Certified Health Coach
Kamau Ferdinand joins Heartbeats Life Center carrying forward the mission Keith and Daphne Ferdinand established in 1983: that lasting health change comes not from a generic plan, but from real partnership, education, and support tailored to the life in front of you. After Hurricane Katrina nearly ended that work in 2005, Heartbeats was rebuilt around health coaching and education — and Ferdinand's own career has run along much the same path.
For over fifteen years, Ferdinand has worked at the intersection of community health, education, and behavior change. As Program Manager of the Healthy Heart Community Prevention Project, he has designed nutrition, heart-health, and food-access programming for New Orleans families — tackling the very risk factors Heartbeats was founded to fight: hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, inactivity, smoking, and stress. Alongside that work, Ferdinand has served Silverback Society Inc. since 2019 — first as Partnership Coordinator, analyzing the organization's partnership portfolio and building the data systems that track its impact, and since 2024 as Programs Director, leading vendor management, performance reporting, and the strategic operational work that keeps a growing nonprofit running. Guided by the belief that it is easier to raise healthy children than to fix broken men, The Silverback Way mentors New Orleans boys into capable, contributing men — a mission that resonates deeply with the preventive, whole-person approach Ferdinand brings to his health coaching work at Heartbeats.
Gain More Energy, Confidence, and an Active Lifestyle
Build lasting habits through a personalized lifestyle plan by our coaches for health that supports your well-being, strengthens your independence, and helps reduce your risk of chronic disease.
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