COACHING
Breaking the cycle of eternal dieting
WHAT IS COACHING?
Coaching is the emerging powerhouse of body shape change.
​
Every day you face a multitude of decisions to make around food. For many, their decisions around food reflect the shape of their body.
​
Your beliefs about yourself and food, the daily habits you repeat, your willpower (or seeming lack of), your reasons for eating when you aren't hungry, (boredom, sadness, a lack of self esteem, your values and self worth), and your influences (friends and social media) all affect how and why you eat as you do.
​
Coaching is about peeling back these layers, discovering why you eat as you do and then replacing these old broken strategies with newer skills and tools to better equip you so you can finally get off the diet hamster wheel.
​
IN A NUTSHELL
"Coaching is about creating a future that is different from the one that you would have arrived at by default if you had no coach...and no commitment"
Steve Chandler
TWO FOCUSES OF COACHING
Coaching is a bespoke service.
​
Some people's key issues lay in learning to stop self sabotaging and improve their relationship with food whilst others will need help with focus on actionable daily habits.
​
I break these two categories down into 2 intertwining focuses:
​
CHANGE YOUR THINKING
CHANGE YOUR HABITS
​
Below are a quick overview of what these typically include:
CHANGE YOUR THINKING
You will never change your actions around food until you truly understand your thoughts around both food and your self.
The hierarchy of THOUGHTS - WORDS - ACTIONS is essential to understand.
​
Before trying to change your actions, focus on changing your thoughts and that voice in your head. Do this and a change of actions will almost certainly follow.
​
Below are the four cornerstones I focus on:
REJECT DIET MENTALITY
Diet Mentality is almost certainly the reason you haven't achieved and maintained your weight loss goal. Â Diet Mentality is continually pushed by the media teeling us what we should aspire to look like. Â Social media encourages us to feel bad if we don't adhere to this shape and encourages us to try to achieve this shape in as little time as possible focusing on the outcome of our efforts.Â
If you look in the mirror and judge yourself on what you see, if you have tried to change your body shape quickly or celebrated every time you lose a lb or two on the scale, and if you have dieted more than once, you probably have Diet Mentality!
Ridding yourself of this yo-yo, goal orientated, judgemental attitude is THE most effective way to change shape and learn to feel comfy in your own skin.
TURN YOUR GOAL INTO AN EMOTION
FIND YOUR TRUE GOAL
If you want to drop body fat you will many times when you are faced with the dilemma of whether you should be healthy or just give in and act in a way that isn't congruent with achieving your goal.
If your goal is simply 'I'd like to look better' or 'I really should get into better shape' you will find reasons of acting in the latter way as these are nothing more than a wish list.
Emotions are far more powerful than 'likes' or 'shoulds'
Unless you truly know what your deep rooted reasons are for wanting to change your old habits, (and you can really feel them), you are likely to always struggle between the battle of 'being good' or 'giving in'.
​
DEVELOP A GROWTH MINDSET
Based on work from Carol Dweck's best selling book 'Mindset' developing a growth mindset is about seeing challenges and setbacks as periods or growth rather than failure.
It is the opposite of all or nothing thinking or perfectionism which are masters of teaching us self sabotage.
Accepting that we are a work in progress allows us to try, fail, accept the failure as a moment of growth, learn from this and evolve...exactly the way we did when we were children.
Developing this mindset will allow better consistency with new habits and a massive reduction of putting oneself down for being a failure when things don't go right.
UNDERSTAND HABITS
When you want to change body composition you are in effect wanting to change your habits.
Not understanding habits would be like wanting to improve your diet but never learning anything about food or health.
Understanding what habits are, why they develop and how to evolves (note: I didn't say break) them teaches you why you act the way you do.
Fail to understand habits and you fail to understand you...and you are unlikely to change if you don't take they time to understand yourself or why you do what you do.
CHANGE YOUR HABITS
James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) states that every habit you perform is there for a reason...if it didn't serve a purpose we wouldn't keep repeating it.
​
Therefore trying to change multiple habits at once (as with most weight loss efforts) without understanding why you have the habit there in the first place leads you into the age old battle of willpower verses habits...and how did that work out for you in the past??
​
Changing just one habit at a time allows you to focus all your efforts on just one thing...not 5...not 10 as with most diets. It has been proven that focusing on a single habit at any one time is nearly 3x more successful than those focusing on 2 habits simultaneously and up to 15x more successful than those who focus on 3 or more habits at once.
​
Below are what I focus on as the core essential habits that I will help you build into your lifestyle:
CHECK IN
Most of our unwanted daily habits happen unconsciously and so follows that many of our unhealthy food choices also happen unconsciously.
Learning to be aware at moments when we are likely to make unhealthy decisions is critical if you want to change anything.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
If you have struggled to lose weight in the past or to keep your weight off, the traditional dieting approach isn't for you.
Bizarrely, slowing things down usually means getting to the finish line faster...and when it comes to dropping weight, is there even a finish line?
​
After 22 years of helping people lose weight, I have found that combining deep routed understandings of why we think and act like we do combined with changing a single habit at a time by far the most effective way of successfully and sustainably changing body shape.
Day has transformed my relationship with food and how I think about my habits and approach to eating. I started my mindset coaching 6 months ago and have successfully lost 9kg of body fat
