Services

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The journey to wellness can be long and difficult to do alone. A health coach will be your guide, your cheerleader, your motivation, and your accountability. Many life changes are difficult to make because they’re overwhelming and there’s no one to keep you motivated or accountable for continuing the steps needed to make those positive changes. A health coach is your ally in your journey to better health.

A health coach is a change expert that helps you make lifestyle changes that are often at the root of many health concerns. For example, a coach can help you control blood sugar through holistic nutritional practices which may change the course of a diabetes diagnosis.  A doctor uses medical and pharmaceutical interventions to treat the symptoms of illness and disease. Sometimes lifestyle modifications may have been prescribed by your doctor, so I am happy to work alongside your physician as part of your team to help you implement those changes. For example, if your doctor has recommended that you lose weight or that you implement a specific food plan, I can help you get started with it, and make it more manageable.

A therapist is a mental health professional who may treat their patients’ mental health with therapy that focuses on past issues - how a problem came to be and then works to heal old pain or trauma through various techniques. By contrast, a health coach is focused on the present-helping their clients move forward out of pain with solutions and actions that focus on what is possible now to make the necessary changes to improve the mind, body, and spirit. Coaches and therapists also work very well together as their techniques complement each other beautifully, and often I see a client move quicker when both are part of the wellness team.  

A life coach and a health coach are very similar and the techniques are essentially the same, as both focus on helping clients achieve their goals. The difference often refers to the subject matter each coach focuses on, though I find that often the issues are usually intertwined, and I am commonly doing life coaching simultaneously with health coaching. A life coach may help a client with social, career, financial, parenting, familial, spiritual, or relationship goals. A health coach instead focuses on health changes such as nutrition, weight, sleep, stress, mindfulness, relationships/connection, exercise, and movement to meet their health and wellness goals, but a good coach can coach a client on anything!  

I use a variety of tools based on the goals of my clients from the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy and The Institute of Functional Medicine. Some examples include food journals, food plans, mindfulness practices, gratitude work, self-care techniques, the Wheel of Life, the phytonutrient spectrum, etc.

I use Motivational Interviewing in every session, which is a client-centered counseling technique that is designed to increase the client’s own motivation and self-efficacy to make positive changes in their lives. I will actively listen without judgment, giving my full attention and reflecting back on what was heard or seen with non-verbal cues. It is through this technique that deep processing starts and where change begins. I make a conscious effort to understand my client’s whole message rather than just hearing the words the client is saying.

I recently took Evelyn Trebole and Elyse Resch’s course on Intuitive Eating which is an anti-dieting approach that embraces body positivity and reconnecting with one’s internal wisdom about eating to unlearn everything we were taught by society about calorie counting and other aspects of diet culture and to learn about the harm of weight stigma. It involves listening to your body and eating what feels right to you instead of following what a fad diet tells you to eat.  Diets may help you lose weight in the short term but can be metabolically disastrous in the long run, often blunting your metabolic rate, so you gain back all, if not more, weight. With Intuitive Eating, you learn how to trust your body to tell you when you’re hungry and listen to the signals your body sends you so you know when you’re full. I am actively learning these techniques and hope to be able to incorporate them, not only into my own life but with my clients who have struggled with the endless cycle of yo-yo dieting. It’s my hope that through these liberating techniques, the shame, and guilt of diet culture can be put to rest.