A New Approach to Nutrition Coaching
Throughout my years helping others with their lifestyle and nutrition, I learned a lot about coaching, and a lot about myself. Last year I began exploring my relationship with food, body image, and how these beliefs influenced my clients, all of which led to a dramatic shift in my approach to coaching.
When I started working as a nutrition coach, I expected all my clients to weigh themselves, measure their food, and log their calories and macros into MyFitnessPal. At the time, I thought of dieting as no more than a basic equation of calories in, calories out. After all, it worked for me and since most clients were focused on weight loss, this felt like a surefire path to success. And it worked—at least, for a while.
After three years of nutrition coaching at GWA, I noticed many clients were going through multiple diet phases with me: they would lose 10-30lbs, gain some weight back during their maintenance phase, then start the weight loss process all over again. It’s not that these clients were doing anything wrong, but their bodies were famished from diets and eager to return to their set weight point. It seemed that the only way for them to maintain their lower weight would be to meticulously track their food and weight forever.
This created another problem: I started to see an increase in disordered eating patterns amongst some of my clients. They became preoccupied with their scales, felt terrible if they gained weight or ate a “bad” food, obsessively tracked everything they consumed, developed anxiety around social events and how they would eat out (or canceled plans completely to avoid “temptation”), and felt moody, tired, persistently sore and unable to recover from their workouts. While some of my clients were able to diet briefly and move on with their lives normally, there was enough of a damaging trend to be concerned. My intent was to always promote health by adding nutritious food into the diet with minimal restriction, but somewhere along the line healthy and disordered became blurred.
By this point, I recognised that my own history of chronically dieting was catching up with me after fifteen years of weight cycling. I decided things needed to change to ensure my clients were nourishing their bodies properly so we could focus on performance, longevity, and confidence at any size. I started to research the health implications from dieting and weight stigma, sought treatment for my own eating disorder, and slowly began to shift to an anti-diet approach through intuitive eating.
While I respect that not everyone will be interested in an anti-diet approach, I feel I am on a new path that reduces the risk of potentially damaging someone’s relationship with food and their body. I believe I am finally promoting a healthy lifestyle that empowers clients with the knowledge to make nutritious choices while learning body acceptance, and I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
Book your complimentary, comprehensive nutrition assessment today. Fill out the form below, or email kate@groundworkathletics.ca to get started!