“Trust In the Process, Trust In the Person”
Changing your nutrition (or your lifestyle in general) can be overwhelming. For a lot of people, food is so much more than just sustenance.
Food is emotional
Food is cultural
Food is habitual
Food is fun
Making the choice to begin working out is much more cut and dry - you go to the gym, you do your workout, you go home. Your trainer is there to hold you accountable to show up to your appointment and to do the work while you’re there. When choosing to improve your nutrition, you’re ultimately choosing to adjust and adapt your life and your habits from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed, all without your coach watching your every move.
This makes healthy eating pretty complex…
Unfortunately, as a Nutrition Coach, clients don’t (and couldn’t) pay me to follow them around all day and slap the office donuts out of their hand or keep them to eating one piece of pizza with their kiddos on Friday night.
Building generally healthy habits is essential to improving your nutrition. But before you can even begin to scratch the surface of creating sustainable, measurable, consistent changes in your eating, you must identify and address the causes of what lead you to the point at which you decided you needed to make changes in the first place. Sometimes, these causes are not obvious.
Just like you trust your Personal Trainer to tell you when they observe your knees caving in on a squat, you must trust your Nutrition Coach when they observe the recurring thoughts, emotions, or behaviors that sabotage your attempts to build the habits it takes to see measurable changes in your nutrition, physique, internal health, or any other area you are looking to improve. You must trust that although they may ask you to have tough conversations, be comfortable being uncomfortable, or sometimes just plain call you on your B.S., it all comes from a place of care. It comes from wanting YOU to realize what you’re ultimately capable of after accepting the reality of your situation and identifying the realistic, pragmatic way of changing it into what you envision as your perfect “healthy lifestyle.”
Too often, people focus on the practical before the personal. Coaches explain how to fix something before addressing why it needs to be fixed in the first place. Being honest with yourself (and with your coach) about your eating habits is hard. Just as food evokes incredibly positive emotions and thoughts in some cases, it can also evoke very negative ones - ones of shame, doubt, embarrassment, frustration, sadness, and more. Taking the leap to be open, honest, and vulnerable with yourself, and then your Nutrition Coach, will cause growth and change in areas you may never have anticipated. In my experience, those changes have a pretty incredible trickle-down effect that nearly ALWAYS leads to the tangible results you’re looking for.