Health and wellness coaching is a somewhat new but growing discipline. Many people are not exactly familiar with what a health and wellness coach does. To understand health and wellness coaching, we need to pay attention to two sets of facts:
- Most of the health problems that we encounter today are from non-communicable diseases. These diseases are non-infectious and chronic. We can not treat them, but we have ways to control them. The most common non-communicable conditions are type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, chronic lung diseases and cancers. About 70 percent of all deaths worldwide result from these diseases. (ref).
- Most of these diseases have their roots, to a great extent, in our lifestyle. What we eat, our physical activities, how we manage stress, smoking, drinking, and our sleep are all parts of our lifestyle that determine our health status.
- These behaviours are mostly part of our daily routines. They are habits, and many of these habits can undermine our health and wellness. Changing some behaviours can help us prevent, control and sometimes reverse these non-communicable diseases. However, changing habits is not always easy. Well, this is where people may need the help of a health and wellness coach.
Habits and disease
Smoking, drinking too much alcohol, unhealthy diets, and a sedentary way of life are all habits that lead to disease, pain and suffering. A change in lifestyle means replacing these unhealthy behaviours with healthy habits. Sometimes we can make these changes by ourselves. However, there are also many times that we need help.
We may have tried a couple of times to lose weight but with no success. A health and wellness coach can help us achieve dietary habits and the weight we wish. Or, We all know that we need to add exercise to our daily lives. But life is busy, and we get stuck in our routine lifestyle. A health and wellness coach can help us transition smoothly to the healthy lifestyle we have always wanted. So are other health and wellness realms of life like having a stress management strategy or making healthy connections with other people.
YOU decide which feature of your health and wellness you want to improve. It can be losing weight, controlling stress, having a new kind of diet or starting to exercise, and the coach accompanies you in your journey toward a healthier life.
What does a health and wellness coach do?
So changing habits and behaviours is the area of expertise of a health and wellness coach. It could be establishing a good routine, like eating more healthily and losing weight or stopping an undesirable one like smoking or binge eating.
A health and wellness coach stands by you in achieving your goals, helps you learn from each step of your challenges, and offers support and accountability.
Health and wellness coaching can help you by:
- Leveraging your strengths
- Attention to your needs
- Building confidence and autonomy
- Helping you design achievable goals
- Supporting sustainable change
Potential clients for health and wellness coaching are people who want to change their habits to reach the level of health and wellness they desire. They include people who want to:
- Lose weight
- Maintain a healthy eating
- Change their diet
- Be more active and add some physical activity to their lifestyle
- Boost their energy level
- Maintain a healthy balance in all aspects of their lives
- Cope with stress
- Adapt to a life-changing health event like being diagnosed with a chronic disease
- Eliminate unhealthy habits (like smoking, overeating, eating junk snacks, and too much involvement with the internet and social media
- Acquire positive and healthy habits (like healthy eating, exercise, reading, and meditation)
Any aspect of your health and wellness life you want to improve, a health and wellness coach can help you. Click One to one health coaching to see how to book health and wellness coaching sessions.