This is part two of the series The Role of Coaching in the Diet Change Process. In part one, we described how important it is to adopt a healthy diet, and that doing so is among the things with the greatest potential for improving our physical and mental well-being, as well as boosting our performance in all our endeavors. We also described why changing one’s diet can be hard. In this part, we take a look at coaching and how it helps in the process.
It’s Not A Sprint—It’s A Marathon
Making gradual, sustainable changes to one’s diet is critical to success. Trying to completely change the diet overnight can be difficult and overwhelming. Instead, small changes should be made over time, such as adding more fruits and vegetables to meals, reducing portions, and reducing the amount of processed foods and added sugars.
One only needs to conduct a straightforward experiment to demonstrate this, and not even consider the always expanding corpus of research supporting it. Consider for a moment that you are about to make a significant decision regarding a diet change that will improve your health, a decision you will follow for the rest of your life. Let’s assume that means eliminating just one kind of food you have eaten your entire life. It may even be something you know is unhealthy, but it has been a staple of your diet for as long as you can remember. How does that make you feel? According to psychology, making such a lifelong commitment can be scary, lead to unconscious resistance, and ultimately harm our chances of success. Instead of feeling like it’s gaining something, our subconscious mind gets the message that it must give something away, something associated with family, happiness, and security, like a particular dish we enjoy at Christmastime.
Following a well-established and defined transformation process, one that works with rather than against the mind (both conscious and subconscious), positions us for long-term success and makes the entire process straightforward and pleasurable.
How Can A Good Coach Help?
This is where a coach comes in. Collaboration between the client and the coach can help achieve long-term success in any type of dietary change.1
A good coach utilizes proven psychological principles that help the client in changing their behavior, principles that have been used by master coaches in the dynamic coach-client relationship to ensure that the entire process is natural, supportive, and doable.
So what exactly is coaching? “Coaching is a vehicle for helping people to achieve a higher level of well-being and performance in life and work, particularly when change is hard. Coaching is a growth-promoting relationship that elicits autonomous motivation, increases the capacity to change, and facilitates a change process through visioning, goal setting, and accountability, which at its best leads to sustainable change for the good.”2 Originating in the high-pressure business environment, where it established itself as a very efficient tool for fostering positive change, coaching is entering new domains of human lives every day, and it is perhaps the most successful way to support dietary change as well.
Coaching vs. Mentoring
One thing worth noting is the difference between a coach and a mentor. A mentor is someone who has knowledge in a specific area, in this case nutrition, and who uses their skills to teach a client; i.e., transfer that knowledge to the client so that they, too, can benefit from it. While there certainly is and probably always will be a place for mentors of different specialties, coaches have proven themselves to be more important in the dietary change process. Unlike a mentor, a coach will not try to teach a client something—they will not try to explain why eating some kinds of food is better than eating others. What they will try to do is start a discovery process to find out where the passion and readiness for a change lie within the client. For example, while drinking enough water and eating mostly fresh foods are two specific health-promoting behaviors, a successful coach will not try to get the client to implement them both at the same time, no matter what. A good coach will instead try to find out which behavioral change the client is ready for at the moment, and in that way utilize the client’s motivation to the most benefit. In other words, a coach will not try to force a change on a client but rather help the client make the change he or she thinks they want to make. This can be especially hard for a coach if he or she is already an expert in a certain topic, like nutrition. Coaches are generally not encouraged to “wear the expert hat”; i.e., to tell the client what to do or not to do. At the same time, it is important that coaches carefully listen to clients and, if necessary, refer them to a licensed therapist in case there are issues that the coach is neither trained nor equipped to handle on their own; e.g., depression, suicidal thoughts, insomnia, etc. It can be equally hard for clients to get used to such a process, for they have been conditioned to see people who are trying to help them as authoritative, always telling them what to do and what not to do. From that perspective, it could be said that a mentor is more useful in the information-gathering phase, helping the client understand the possibilities of different approaches, while a coach is more useful in the change process, once the client knows what he or she would like to achieve. A coach can help a client see what is important to them and what they may want to change about themselves in different directions.
Read more article related to lifestyle change or self-actualization on our Zealousness blog Self-actualization – iN Education Inc. (ineducationonline.org).
References
- Armato, J., et al. (2017). “Effectiveness of a weight loss intervention with coaching versus without coaching: A randomized trial.” Journal of General Internal Medicine, 32(8), 835-842.
- Moore, Margaret. Coaching Psychology Manual (p. 1). LWW. Kindle Edition.
