So, What Exactly is a Health Coach?
“The most important thing you can do on your journey to wellness is to build a collaborative health-care team – a group of experts who advocate for and assist you with the medical and nonmedical aspects of healing.” (From The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook by Mickey Trescott and Angie Alt)
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If you have ended up on my website reading this blog you have already taken the first step to achieving better health, educating yourself on practitioners that can help you with your goal of living more healthily. Kudos to you for making time for yourself and making YOURSELF a priority! We all know how difficult that can be in this busy society where we are expected to just GO GO GO and function without much regard for quality sleep, nourishing meals or time to unwind.
If, like me and 133 million other Americans, you are suffering from one or more chronic health conditions that diminish your quality of life, then read on.
A nutrition or health coach is a complementary care practitioner who specializes in coaching and advising on a healthy diet and lifestyle. A health coach is a wellness professional whose main role is to guide clients to reach their health and wellness goals, whether they are sleeping better, boosting energy, losing weight, managing stress, or something else! Health coaches create a safe space for their clients to explore their health, facilitating behavior and lifestyle change that can be sustained for the long term.
Using their nutrition, holistic health and coaching education, health coaches help their clients discover which foods and lifestyle choices make them feel best. Most importantly, health coaches take a holistic approach to health, focusing not just on food, but also all the other areas of life that can support and nourish overall health, such as physical activity, home cooking, living environment, creativity, and career. This is an Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) core concept that we call “primary foods,” and IIN health coaches utilize this concept in their work to set themselves apart from other health coaches.
I graduated from the IIN in June 2021, and in addition to their Health Coach Training Program I also completed the Gut Health Specialty course with IIN in Jan 2022.
The gut and its incredible 30-foot-long ecosystem is the most fascinating topic to me – go ahead call me a gut nerd ;-). What most individuals are not aware of is the fact that approximately 70% of our immune system lives in the gut! Digest that for a minute (pun intended)! So, wouldn’t it make sense to tackle healthier living by taking care of our digestive function first?
That is why I specialize in helping individuals improve their gut function in my 1:1 coaching sessions. These are some of the topics you can expect me to delve into if you are a coaching client of mine.
The human microbiome – what is it and what are small daily actions that you can take to support its health?
The three phases of digestion – how does food move from the mouth through the stomach and intestines? What happens on a chemical and physical level and how can I make small changes to my eating habits that will help me digest food easier?
Stress and gut health – did you know that stress is one of the biggest disruptors of gut health? Long-term, or chronic stress alone can undo even the healthiest of diets and lifestyles and really sabotage our digestive and overall health! Let’s brainstorm together what achievable action steps you can take to be mindful of ‘how’ you eat, and not just what!
The gut-brain connection – did you know that the gut is often referred to as the ‘second brain’? Have you heard of the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve that connects the brain to all organs in the digestive system and functions as a two-way information pathway? I can help you create lifestyle practices to strengthen vagal tone, which supports the parasympathetic nervous system and the health of the gut.
These are just a few examples of how I, as your health coach, can work with you to raise your awareness of key bodily functions and shift behaviors to reach your health, weight, and wellness goals.
Erica Zellner, a health coach at the Parsley Clinic, was recently quoted in a New York Times article about the crucial role health coaches play: “I never met a patient that didn’t have some resistance to change. Coaches take the time to get to know patients fully, find their internal motivation and set them up for success that’s personalized. Health happens in the 99.9 percent of your life when you’re not in the doctor’s office.”
Those personalized success strategies are what great health coaches are known for, and they can mean the difference between reaching your health goals, and just knowing what you “should” do but not having the tools to implement it.
Health Coaches do not, however, replace your primary or specialist medical care; we do not diagnose, treat, or prescribe medications or supplements. We always recommend you seek the appropriate guidance of a medical professional for treatment of medical issues.
There’s another quote from that New York Times article, this one from Dr. Russell S. Phillips, director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care, on the way health coaches fit into a strong health care team: “Health coaching should be an integral part of primary care. It helps patients better manage chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension and improves outcomes. As a primary care doctor, I am focused on diagnosis, treatment, and a lot of other medical issues. It’s great to have health coaches available to help patients make needed changes and sustain them over time.”
The way I see it, every day is an opportunity to take a small, achievable action step towards your personal health goals. It doesn’t matter how small it is, as long as you keep pointing the needle towards health! Today will never come back around again and we don’t have any time to waste, so what are you waiting for?