So what is health coaching?
Health Coaching is method of helping people to change and improve their lifestyle for the better and the longterm. It seeks to identify blocks that people might have about lifestyle change and work with them to identify these blocks and navigate around them. Change is such as hard process, and many changes are difficult to contemplate without guidance. This is what health coaching helps with finding the blocks, acknowledging them and navigating ways around them. All in a supportive and assistive environment with accountability from a coach. So there is no telling off, but lots of ‘why’ questions to promote thinking about ways around problems and finding methods to overcome them. It’s not about scolding, it’s about finding a way to communication with people who are ready to change and motivated to finding ways of improving they health.
How might it work for you?
An example of how health coaching might work could be a situation where a person who is overweight, doesn’t eat a very healthy diet and who doesn’t exercise much might feel like they have failed at loosing weight over the years as they lost it through really restrictive eating patterns which they couldn’t maintain longterm and then put it back on slowly. We might work together on changing eating habits, but also on some gentle (other options are available!) exercise, reducing alcohol intake and changing the focus from food to healthy lifestyle. This might feel less restrictive for this person.
Give me another example?
Another situation might be where a person has some blood tests and is diagnosed as is borderline diabetic. They might wish to try and address this, as diabetes comes with many risks such as kidney damage, eyesight deterioration and increased risks of strokes and heart attacks. We might work together on increasing the amount of exercise this person is doing, introduce them to different stimulating supportive exercise based activities: some of these might be women’s walking groups, couch to 5K running programme, wild dancing classes, wild swimming all might be included. Focusing on small little longterm changes over long periods of time, rather than dramatic draconian life changes that are unsustainable. Most people can think of things they’d like to try, health coaching tries to slowly unpick the blocks and locks to finding positive changes to people’s individual lives.