It’s the start of a New Year and, like many of us, you may have decided that now is the right time to improve your health. You know you will feel better, look better and have more energy. It can be easy to find the motivation to get started straight after an overindulgent Christmas, setting New Year’s resolutions to eat better, lose weight or get fitter. Full of good intentions and highly motivated, we embark on our new health regimes enthusiastically. We may be disciplined enough to stick to our resolutions for a few weeks but often the changes we make are not sustainable in the long term and we have no idea how to maintain our results. Whether we experience success or not it is likely that within weeks, old habits will start to creep back in and before we know it, we are back at square one, feeling like we have failed. If this sounds familiar then you are not alone!
So, why do we find it so hard to make the changes that we know will be good for our health and wellbeing? And why is it so difficult to stick with it whenever we do make a change? Well, the good news is that it is not because we are weak-willed!
The culture we currently live in does not make it easy for us to make healthy food choices. We all know that fruit and vegetables are good for us and that it is beneficial to eat lots of fresh, whole foods. Despite knowing this, many of us still don’t get our ‘5 a day’ of fruit and veg. In addition, we are consuming more processed and ultra-processed foods than ever before. We are overwhelmed with food choices much of the time, in our homes, at work, in supermarkets and when we are out and about. Food marketing is big business and we are bombarded with adverts and packaging, enticing us with promises of smells, tastes and textures we find hard to resist. The messages we see on food packaging, such as ‘no added sugar’ and ‘low fat’ are designed to make us believe we are making a healthy choice but this is not always the case. And there are so many conflicting views in the media about what exactly a healthy diet is; should we be eating low carb, no carb, low fat, paleo, Mediterranean, keto, vegan, or something else? We are busier than ever before and so we reach for convenient snacks, ready meals and fast food, which are cleverly formulated with added sugars, fats and salt to give us an almost addictive ‘high’ when we eat them. If we do find the time to shop for and cook healthy food, we may be put off by having to cook for fussy eaters and individual preferences. It is not surprising that we are struggling to feed ourselves well! So, what is the secret to success?
This is where working with a Health Coach can make all the difference. As a certified Health Coach I am specially trained to help you navigate the confusing and conflicting information out there so you become clear on what a healthy, nutritious diet looks like, all backed up by recent scientific research. I will work with you to adapt this to your own preferences, considering your food likes and dislikes, how much time you have to shop and cook, and who you cook for. You will learn to be more in tune with the signals your body is giving you so that you understand how different foods affect the way you feel, enabling you to make better choices for your body.
A Health Coach is not just there to help you to establish better eating habits because great health and wellbeing rely on more than just eating good quality, nutritious food. I will work with you holistically to explore how your current lifestyle choices, across all areas of your life, impact your health and wellbeing. This includes looking at your sleep patterns, stress levels, how much you exercise, your relationships and social connections, your personal values and your sense of purpose and meaning in your life. I will support you to set your own personalised health goals and help you create a clear, inspiring vision of what your ideal health and wellbeing looks like. My aim is to empower you to make realistic, but also exciting, sustainable changes to your diet and lifestyle, including looking at what specifically has stopped you reaching your goals in the past and what is getting in the way now. By understanding what you struggle with most, you will be able to create new strategies to overcome these obstacles and take realistic, achievable steps to get closer to your goals. And vitally, to ensure you achieve your goals, I will be your accountability partner, always on your side, providing support but also keeping you accountable for making the changes you choose, to achieve your ideal health.
Health coaching is a completely personalised, holistic approach to achieving your health goals and creating new heathy habits. If you have tried before and failed, or if you have a new reason to make changes, then make health coaching the secret ingredient in your recipe for success!
For more information email catherine@thehealthcoachingcabin.co.uk, or to book a free 30 minute ‘Health and Energy Review’ coaching call to discuss what health coaching could do for you, click here.
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