It’s no secret that life is increasingly more stressful. Coping with the demands of everyday life often leads to the formation of bad health habits. Like drinking coffee three times a day or emotionally distancing yourself from your loved ones. The good news? You can find freedom from life’s stressors. That’s just one of the benefits of one-on-one health coaching that I’m going to talk about today!
Leading a healthy lifestyle and letting go of bad health habits sounds so simple. Yet, it’s so hard for many of us. We become ingrained in our ways and every failed new year’s resolution makes you think, “wow, I really can’t do this.”
This is where a health coach can have a profound impact.
What is Holistic Health Coaching?
You want to lose weight but fail time and time again. It’s not because you’re not trying, in fact, you feel like you try harder every year.
What you might not know is that if you want to manage your body weight, your relationship to food, exercise, and even emotional wellbeing all play a role. Not to mention any hormonal inhibitors to losing weight like insulin resistance.
A holistic health coach will identify these different spheres for you. Health coaching works by giving people the confidence, knowledge, and skills to become active participants in their own care and achieve their self-identified health goals. Sometimes you just need someone to point you in the right direction. That’s what a one-on-one health coach can do.
Holistic health coaching uses an integrative approach to diet and lifestyle changes to improve your health. Through education, in a coaching framework, you are able to realize your health-related goals.
The difference between health coaching and holistic health coaching is that any interrelated issues are addressed that affect poor health or are connected to health to achieve long-term results. A holistic health coach looks at the body, mind, and spirit as one. A few of the facets that a holistic health coach will look at include: nutrition, physical fitness, relationships, spirituality, and even recreational activities.
The Benefits of Health Coaching
Change is often difficult, even when it’s something you want. A health coach can help when you feel like nothing you’ve done has worked.
Not only that, but one-on-one health coaching also works well with many different types of people and in many different settings. The benefits of it are universal.
One study found that people who went through three months of health coaching significantly improved:
- Blood pressure.
- Cholesterol.
- Glucose (blood sugar).
- Triglycerides (blood fat).
- Body weight.
- Cardiovascular fitness.
Here are a few other benefits of health coaching:
Accountability
Knowing what you want to accomplish and then actually doing it are two very different things. Working with a health coach will ensure you not only identify your goals, but achieve them, too. A health coach will help you break your goals down into small, actionable steps. They will be there to keep you on track.
Mindset
Your mindset has the power to influence your progress. A health coach will help you identify unhealthy habits and come up with a plan to address those habits. After all, your emotional health is just as important as your physical health.
Moral
A health coach looks at things from a positive perspective rather than a negative one. It’s extremely important to find joy in the process. Positive feelings in one area of life tend to overflow into other areas of life, too.
Health coaching works by giving people the confidence, knowledge, and skills to become active participants in their own care and achieve their self-identified health goals. Sometimes you just need someone to point you in the right direction.
Health Coaching is a Personalized Approach
Research shows that regular physical activity, correct nutrition, tobacco cessation, and a few other common lifestyle interventions can help mitigate the progression of many noncommunicable chronic diseases. Despite this overwhelming scientific evidence, potentially preventable lifestyle-related chronic diseases remain the leading causes of death, disability, and avoidable health care costs in our society.
The reason for this is not as complex as you might think.
Primary care physicians don’t have the time, infrastructure, or resources to focus adequate attention on lifestyle management; and receive little or no compensation for the provision of such preventive services.
Health coaching on the other hand is a highly personalized approach that focuses on lifestyle management.
The goal of health coaching is to improve quality of life, productivity, and longevity through healthy lifestyles. It’s individualized and specific to your needs, which is why it’s so successful.
Research shows the clinical effectiveness of health coaching in terms of modification of multiple risk factors in healthy persons as well as those with certain common chronic diseases.
Healthy Behavior Change
The important part of one-on-one health coaching is healthy behavior change. It’s easy to join a group class or a group coaching program and feel like you’re competing with the other members. Or, you feel like you’re not as important as your fellow members. This type of mindset can lead to unhealthy behavior change.
One-on-one health coaching means you are the priority. Your needs and health issues are protected.
Additionally, coaching is as effective when administered remotely by phone or the Internet as compared with face-to-face coaching. This provides great flexibility, as coaching can be performed in person, over the phone, or via videoconferencing.
RELATED: HOW TO CREATE MEANINGFUL WELLNESS GOALS FOR THE NEW YEAR
How to Find the Right Health Coach?
It’s important to find a health coach whose experience covers issues you want to address.
Here are a few things to look for when choosing a health coach.
- They have a purpose to improve your health and wellness.
- They believe that people are resourceful and have self-management abilities.
- They want to form an active partnership with you.
- They focus on the benefit to you by providing a personalized approach.
- They set goals for you based on your preferences.
- They help you assess where you’re at and see how to move forward through taking action.
- They aim to improve insight through health education, reflection, identifying barriers, and strategies of self-awareness.
- They desire you to feel empowered as a consequence of health coaching.
If you’re interested in hiring a health coach, I offer a customized one-on-one coaching program where we dig deeper, discovering the unique barriers to your own vision of health.
Send me a message through my contact page to get started!
Mandy Patterson
