What is a Health Coach?

A Health Coach is what I am studying to become. Health Coaching is a relatively new thing. We have doctors and psychiatrists, dentist, surgeons, and dietitians. We’ve also had Life Coaches for some time.

So where does health coaching fit in? Health coaching fits with YOU, your lifestyle, your preferences, etc. Doctors tell you what is wrong, or what they think is wrong, and prescribe something.

They may tell you to get more exercise and lose weight, lower your blood pressure, lower your cholesterol, etc. But they don’t tell you how to do it. You walk away thinking, now what do I do to make this happen?

 

A dietitian or a nutritionist will give you much more information on what foods to eat or avoid, but they don’t address the rest of you, and may not be there to call on when you’re still confused or nothing is working. They don’t know about other things in your life that can affect your weight or nutrition success.

Going out and just losing weight isn’t a simple matter. People try to starve themselves or they eat less of the same unhealthy foods. But nothing lasts.

They buy the latest best-selling diet book and lose weight in the beginning only to gain it back a few months later. Or they can’t stick with it long enough to lose anything.

 

“Everyone tells you what to do and what’s good for you. They don’t want you to find your own answers. They want you to believe theirs.” – Socrates.

 

This is where health coaching comes in

Health Coaches help you come up with a plan that you think will work for YOU, not society as a whole, as most diet books do. Health coaches take all of your concerns into consideration. And we do want you to find your own answers! We help get you there.

Health Coaches look at more than the food you eat. That is called Secondary Nutrition. Many other factors in our lives play into our overall health and weight concerns. Those are called Primary Nutrition.

Factors of Primary Nutrition include spirituality, relationships, career, physical activity, and more.

Health Coaches are there for motivation. You won’t came back in to the office to be weighed and then told you still have to lose more, come back in 2 months. We care about YOU, not just your results.

The Health Coach will ask how you felt eating certain foods, or eliminating others. They will ask about your stress levels and if needed, help you find a way to reduce them.

They may guide you to helpful information, provide you with recipes, and suggest many ways you can incorporate more activity into your life, plus much more.
Health Coaches look at all of these areas of your life, Primary and Secondary Nutrition, to come up with a customized holistic (whole) plan, not a one size fits all diet.

Lastly, they are the captain of your support team, and guide you into being the best you can be!

Gearing Up and Falling Behind

Yay, it’s been kind of spring-ish! At least every 3 days or 4 days here in the Midwestern part of the US. Lots of garden prep and yard work ahead. I was going to write about what health coaches do and don’t do, but I’ve fallen a bit behind with studies, and have had some other stuff come up over the course of the last week. And more to come for a couple of days. So as soon as I can, I want to give you some more specific information you could use. I’ll share a lot of very interesting tidbits of info from here and there. I hope to get that out later this week. Then the health coach information will come in the following post. Hope to see you both times and beyond, and hope wherever you are, you are experiencing some fresh, pleasant, rejuvenating type of weather!

Blending Old and New: The Best of Both Worlds

There is a new movement, or paradigm, in the way we look at health. Our current Western philosophy simply doesn’t work in the long run. It’s called allopathic medicine, which is treatment based on the symptoms and not what caused the symptoms. And we have now come to the conclusion that a pill will take care of anything that doesn’t require surgery.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for modern medicine, there certainly is. But there is so much more. It’s the way we go about it that most often doesn’t work, or it seems to work, but there are still problems, or the treated problems return due to not addressing their root cause(s).

What is the “so much more”? Old cultural traditions looked at the entire person and what was going on in their lives, their environment. They also based health around the foods they ate; not just what they ate, but when and how those foods were eaten, prepared, and/or combined.

These things were learned over time through not just trial and error, but through observance and intuition; through being in tune with their bodies and nature. In addition, they placed high importance on spirituality.

Now for the modern component; science has allowed us to see things that never could have been seen before.  The application of that science is where we‘ve kind of gone astray. We focus so hard on the minutest pieces of the puzzle, and then apply them in the same fashion, focusing only on one part of our system. Dr. Frank Lipman gives the analogy of playing the game “Whack A Mole”*.

From Meriam-Webster http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary:

holistic

relating to or concerned with complete systems rather than with individual parts

:  of or relating to holism

:  relating to or concerned with wholes or with complete systems rather than with the analysis of, treatment of, or dissection into parts <holistic medicine attempts to treat both the mind and the body> <holistic ecology views humans and the environment as a single system>

integrate

to combine (two or more things) to form or create something

to make (something) a part of another larger thing

to make (a person or group) part of a larger group or organization

The new way is not entirely new, but encompasses both worlds, old and new. It is integrative. What has always been present in the older philosophies  and practices is a holistic view. So it all boils down to blending ancient wisdom and modern science and using that to treat the person as a whole living system, and to see that person as a unique model of human being.  We are all slightly different models of the same species with different environments, physical, mental, and spiritual.

“Body, mind, and spirit are not separate parts. Instead they are more like lenses, or ways of focusing. The awareness of oneness, and the peace it brings, can be nurtured by anyone who is interested.”
― Marcey Shapiro, in Freedom From Anxiety: A Holistic Approach to Emotional Well-Being

If you want to learn more about the melding of Eastern and Western practices, one great place to start is Paul Pitchford, MS website www.healingwithwholefoods.com or check out his book ”Healing with Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition”; or Frank Lipman, MD, www.drfranklipman.com.

*Personal Note: I’m quite proud of my understanding of much of this. I wrote this before I listened to a lecture by Frank Lipman where he says much of the same things but with professional experience and more detail than I know. I added his analogy at the last moment. He even used a quote by Wendell Berry that I had been considering using, so I’ll save that one for later.

Coming up in the next blog:

Taking a look at just nutrition, in our modern world, we are just learning how important it really is in our health. Modern doctors do not get education in nutrition, or very, very little, in medical school. Dieticians and nutritionists, look only at that aspect. Most people need some help in bridging that gap, in figuring out how to implement the directives given by these professionals in a way that works for them. And they may find they need more than just to increase their fiber intake, for example, but need to learn how to reduce stress and heal their relationships, etc.

This is part of why health coaches are needed. I’ll talk about what they do and what they don’t do next time.

 

© Gena Howe and Finding Health and The Cat Lady, Current Year or Year Range2014-2106. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this written material and photographs without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Gena Howe and Finding Health and The Cat Lady with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Housekeeping

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Opening and Closing Doors, and the Rightness of Not Belonging

These times are all about new beginnings for me. A new residence, new again partner, new lifestyle, eating and cooking styles, new career.  A new journey.

It took me a couple of years to finally enroll in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN), but I am so glad I did. I held back because of lack of money for tuition, and I had found myself in a place, and time, of bad vibes and a feeling of stagnation. My motivation had flown the coop. I was stressed and tired and mentally unchallenged. Things were much better when my ex-husband and I got back together, but in the beginning we were still living 3 hours apart, and those other aspects of my life were still there. Then a flood hit my area destroying my home, and I was forced to rent a very crappy old mobile home in a very crappy mobile home park. The mold I was escaping in my flooded and damaged beyond repair home seemed to be hidden everywhere in the one year rental. I became sick and out of breath very easily. I was coughing and wheezing, sometimes so hard I vomited. It literally felt as if my lungs were being coughed out. My eyes itched horribly and I felt tightness in my chest, especially when bending down, making it hard for me to quickly unload pallets on my grocery clerk shifts.

Nothing came up job-wise for my ex-husband in my area, so I moved in with him, in my hometown – and in the country with no high-speed internet. But I was away from the sick building and my stalled life. Lack of high speed internet also meant my work from home job I’d had for 5 years each spring was out the window. There isn’t much of anything here and I didn’t really want to go back to mindless cashiering somewhere. So one day I finally made the call. I sold part of my inherited IRA and I was off, or in?

This school is one of the best things I have ever done. I’ve learned so much in so little time. But it’s not just that. There is this beautiful, big, loving community there. I’ve never felt so connected in my life. People are so supportive and non-judgmental. And I finally found a lot of like-minded people. I had been around like-minded people, but not to this extent. I still didn’t really fit in and at IIN I do.

Now here is a bit of an oxymoron. At IIN, we talk about “fitting out”, vs “fitting in”. In other words, just allow yourself to be who you are. No keeping up with the Joneses or trying to be in the “In” crowd, but allow yourself to “fit out”. Be you and live for you. I’ve read statements from student after student saying they never fit in anywhere, but at IIN.  We are interested in the things that aren’t quite mainstream yet. We are actually on the cutting edge of a new way to approach health in many nations. However this new way isn’t really all that new. Many philosophies of the ages have practiced a holistic approach to health and wellness. We’ve been reminded that a huge portion of America has still never been in a health food store. Too many people are still stuck behind the slick marketing campaigns of big food companies out for nothing more than profit. Those people sometimes look at us like we’re nuts when we talk about eating whole foods, or worse, if we mention adding chia seeds or hemp seeds to our oatmeal! So we all gave up the idea of “fitting in” and just let things happen. And here we all are, now “fitting in” in our new-found community, ready to help others navigate around the hype and find ways to take control of their own health.

One last thought. I had this at a point where I had lost so much so fast. “You never know what you might gain by losing something.”* What I had lost, in retrospect, was actually a lot of dark clouds and negativity. And that closing door led to more doors opening than I could have imagined at the time.

*(I really did have this thought maybe about 5 years before the commercial on tv saying “what will you gain when you lose”? I’m not even sure what the commercial is for. Some conventional highly processed food to “lose weight”, I believe, but I think they heard me).

Maiden Voyage

I’m glad you found my blog and I certainly hope you’ll return. I’m just now getting started and will have a real post soon. And photos! whenever I can get my horrible dial-up connection to upload any. Please take a look at my About page and I certainly hope to see you again soon!