Are you looking to make healthy lifestyle changes for a “better me” in 2025? A health coach can help you get – and stay – on track with your wellness goals. As a certified health coach, I take a holistic approach to wellness and explore ALL the things that affect your health, such as relationships, spirituality, finances, physical activity, and creativity. I then use this knowledge to create a personalized wellness plan that focuses on things beyond just food choices, addressing factors like stress, relationships, environment, and lifestyle habits so you can achieve optimal health.
My Health Coaching Process
The initial consultation starts with the “circle of life” or the “primary food”, which includes:
- Physical Activity
- Home Cooking
- Home Environment
- Relationships
- Social Life
- Joy
- Spirituality
- Career
- Creativity
- Finances
- Education
- Health
If any of these 12 aspects of your life are out of balance, you can experience dysregulation in sleep and diet, anxiety, and other issues. If you’re not getting enough sleep, you might not have the energy to work out or focus on meal planning. This may seem like it is just too complicated, but a health coach can help you sort out where to start and find ways to make small changes that grow over time. I work closely with my coaching clients to find the underlying causes and bring them back to balance.
As we address these 12 aspects, we can turn to the “secondary food”— figuring out which diet is right for you!
Integrative Nutrition in Action
I received my certification from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) and follow their “integrative nutrition in action” methodology. As your health coach, we work together exploring diverse dietary theories spanning from ancient Eastern traditions to modern Western medicine. This approach does NOT focus on what is “right” or “wrong” – there is no one-size-fits-all diet. Instead, we follow four nutrition principles:
- Bio-individuality
- Multidimensional health
- Primary food
- Secondary food
We then work on a nutrition plan that best fits your needs.
What Else Does a Health Coach Do?
In addition to uncovering the best primary and secondary food for you, think of a health coach as your personal health guide, mentor and supporter. They help you make lifestyle changes to improve your physical and emotional health. Your primary care provider may suggest working with a health coach to support you in reaching certain goals. A health coach helps you set reasonable goals and develop a plan for reaching them. They also help you figure out what barriers may be keeping you from reaching those goals. For example, maybe you don’t think you’re capable of making the changes your doctor is suggesting. Or maybe you don’t think any changes you make will matter. Perhaps you’re working two jobs and can’t imagine squeezing anything else into your day.
Your health coach helps you look at all the factors that might be affecting your health-related behaviors and comes up with a manageable plan for working toward your goals.
Your health coach regularly checks in with you through email, phone, virtually or in-person meetings. During these conversations, your coach asks questions to get you thinking about how you can overcome challenges.
A health coach is your partner in your behavior change process. This process involves supporting you as you set goals, unearth values and strengths, and access intrinsic motivations to encourage the development of sustainable healthy behaviors and attitudes.
The coaching process is similar to talk therapy in that it involves two people discussing ideas and issues, but it is different in that the person who is being coached is in the driver’s seat, creating their goals as well as the strategies on how to arrive at these goals.
Addressing Barriers
Health coaches also recognize that personal choices are just one piece of the puzzle. Simply wanting to eat more fruits and veggies isn’t enough to make it happen. You might have other factors in your life — called social determinants of health — that affect your food choices and many other choices related to your health. And it can be very hard to overcome these barriers.
For example, you might have limited access to nutritious foods (food insecurity). Or maybe there aren’t sidewalks on your street, so popping outside for a quick walk isn’t a safe option. Perhaps you don’t have access to reliable childcare, so it’s hard to make self-care a priority.
As a health coach, I suggest resources to help manage these types of factors so that they have less of an impact on your health. My goal is to support you – not cast judgment or blame. Through open and honest conversations, we investigate what’s going on in your life and I help find and offer the best solutions
What Are the Potential Benefits of Health Coaching?
Working with a health coach may help you:
- Recognize your strengths
- Use your strengths to reach goals
- Believe in yourself and your ability to make changes
- Develop a plan you feel good about sticking with
But the benefits extend beyond your attitudes and beliefs. Research shows that health coaching can lead to measurable improvements in things like:
- Blood pressure.
- Cholesterol levels.
- Blood sugar levels.
- Body weight.
- Aerobic fitness.
A health coach can be a great complement to working with other healthcare providers, such as your:
- Primary care provider
- Dietitian
- Physical therapist
- Counselor/therapist
While these other providers may offer medical recommendations and treatment plans, a health coach helps focus on the behaviors it takes to put those plans into action
A health coach specializes in behavior change, helping you:
- Build problem-solving skills.
- Build coping skills.
- Develop action steps to achieve your health goals
Health Coaches Use Motivational Interviewing Techniques
A key technique utilized by coaches is motivational interviewing, in which a coach asks open-ended questions intended to help you elicit your own reasons for change. Instead of the doctor saying, “You need to lose weight,” a coach might ask, “How might your life be different if you lost the weight that you’ve been trying to lose?”
Coaching is effective for people managing a variety of health conditions. According to a recent study, coaching “results in clinically relevant improvements in multiple biomarker risk factors (including systolic and diastolic blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, fasting glucose, body weight, body mass index, waist circumference, and cardiorespiratory fitness) in diverse populations.”
Looking to learn more about how a health coach can help you achieve your wellness goals? Connect with me to schedule a free consultation.
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