Coaching is a form of development in which a coach supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance.
Health coaches are change agents.
The coach will use special techniques, personal experience, expertise and encouragement to assist the coachee in bringing his / her behavioural changes about while aiming for improved health.
They also understand how habits form, they know how to reverse them, and they specialise in helping people overcome obstacles in pursuit of their goals. As part of a collaborative care team that includes GPs, Functional Medicine practitioners, nutritionists, and other allied health providers, health coaches support their clients as they make positive changes.
The role of the coach is not just coaching! Health coaches assist people in developing to their full potential. They are responsible for improvement by analysing performance, instructing in relevant skills and by providing encouragement.
A good coach offers education, support and assistance to those he or she is coaching to help them implement change and achieve desired goals.
Coaches are responsible for planning, organising and delivering an appropriate range of activities and programmes for individuals. Typical responsibilities include teaching new skills, principles and techniques: what to remove from your pantry, or where and what to shop for a healthy pantry.
A Health Coach is a supportive mentor and wellness authority helping clients feel their best through food, exercise & lifestyle changes by tailoring individualised wellness programs to meet their clients' needs.
Generally, health coaches work with individuals to help them improve their health and then maintain a healthy lifestyle. This includes establishing dietary principles, safe exercise routines, and monitoring systems. The coach generally works one on one with clients or in small groups.
Coaching Process
Audit
A detailed personal lifestyle audit is undertaken, along with clear and reasonable goals.
SWOT Analysis
Aims to raise clients' awareness of problems and possibilities while reducing their ambivalence about change by a focus on the present and future, rather than the past.
Objective Setting
A health and wellness vision is a creative statement by the client that reveals his/her highest potential and can include physical or emotional realms of their life. A vision empowers one to see new possibilities along with a specific and clear direction.
Guiding the strategy and goal setting
Guiding the strategy and goal setting is a collaborative behaviour change technique used between the coach and the client.
Goals promote behaviour change through a collaborative process, which includes the coach making a plan to track and evaluate progress.
Monitoring, Measurement, and Revisions
After a set period a review of the achievements can be taken and a new set of activities programmed to achieve more.
According to the Primal Health Coaching Institute, ‘The Primal Health Coach Program is centred on ancestral health principles, a scientifically validated wellness plan that mimics that of our primal ancestors and supports our genetic evolutionary blueprint with real-food, low-carb eating, inspired movement and play, and stress-reduction and balance in all aspects of life.'
As part of the ancestral health movement, the Primal Blueprint nutrition, fitness and lifestyle behaviour program has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and counting. With you on our team, we can help so many others maximise their health and thrive.'
What Is a Primal Health Coach?
A health coach is a wellness expert who educates, motivates and guides clients toward lifestyle and behaviour choices that support optimal well-being. A Primal Health Coach stays ahead of the curve with an integrated approach, helping others create lives of maximum vitality using nutrition and fitness intelligence based on scientifically validated ancestral health principles. The aim of the Primal Health Coach is to help clients extract the most joy, satisfaction, and fulfilment from their lives by focusing on their values, needs, visions and goals in an extremely personalised way.
About Mark Sisson, Founder of the Primal Health Coaching Institute
Mark Sisson is a celebrated best-selling health and fitness author credited as the “godfather” of paleo/primal and a leading figure in the ancestral health community. He is a former world-class distance runner, triathlete and Ironman competitor, finishing 4th in the February 1982 Ironman World Championship. He secured a top-5 finish in the 1980 U.S. National Marathon Championships and earned a qualifying spot for the U.S. Olympic trials. After retiring from professional competition, Mark coached hundreds of professional athletes to success.
An avid academic, Mark was a pre-med candidate and earned a biology degree from Williams College. He served for 15 years as chairman of the International Triathlon Union (ITU) Anti-Doping Commission and as the ITU’s liaison to the International Olympic Committee. He began sharing his vast nutrition science knowledge with the ancestral health community by way of his award-winning blog, Mark’s Daily Apple.
Mark is also the founder of Primal Nutrition, Inc., a company devoted to health education and designing state-of-the-art supplements that address the challenges of living in the modern world, and the genius behind Primal Kitchen®, a full range of healthy and delicious primal/paleo condiments and snacks.
Mark teamed up with other leading experts to create the Primal Health Coach program, the world’s first coaching program based on the evolutionary health movement.
Several studies have shown health coaching to be effective in improving various aspects of health. One study on Type 2 diabetes concludes that after six months, individuals who were coached showed improvement in medication adherence another showed a reduction in medication. Coaching had a positive effect on patients' knowledge, skill, self-efficacy and behaviour change while a non-coached control group did not show any improvement. Additionally, coached participants with a haemoglobin A1C over 7% showed significant improvement in A1C.
A study on coronary heart disease indicated that patients in a coaching program achieved a significantly greater change in total cholesterol than non-coached patients, with a considerable reduction in LDL-C. Those involved in the coaching program showed improvements in secondary outcomes such as weight loss, increased exercise, improved quality of life, less anxiety, and improvement in overall health and mood.
Another study shows that coaching is an effective program for assisting individuals with self-efficacy and weight loss. Confidence to lose weight increased from a baseline of 60% to 71% at three months, 76% at 6 months and 79% at 12 months. The average body mass index significantly decreased during this interactive coaching study. Average baseline was 32.1%, and then documented at 3 months (31.4%), 6 months (31.0%), and 12 months (30.6%).
Of the 56.4 million deaths worldwide in 2015, 6 of the top 7 causes of death worldwide accounted for 22.9 million of them and were non-communicable diseases: Ischaemic heart disease, Stroke, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Lung cancer, Diabetes and Dementias. One in three people will get some form of cancer at some time. By the age of 85, there’s a 50% chance you’ll be suffering from dementia.
Obesity and diabetes are pandemics. The number of adults with diabetes has quadrupled in the past 25 years, from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014. This adds up to a global prevalence of 8.5% in 2014 vs. 4.7% in 1980. 90–95% of these individuals have type 2 diabetes. This number is expected to increase to 592 million by 2035. [WHO]
Diabetes is no longer a disease of the affluent, with lower socioeconomic groups being disproportionately affected in high-income countries and with 77% of the world’s diabetic population living in low- and middle-income countries. It is also no longer predominantly a disease of older persons, with almost half of the people with diabetes in the 40- to 59-year age range.
Common everyday foods are responsible for contributing to these deaths and the growing number of auto-immune issues.
At the same time, even the good food you eat can be depleted of the essential micro-nutrients you need for optimal health and a strong immune system. Suboptimal micronutrients make the inflammation situation worse.
Our western diet recommended by most health care professionals is based on dodgy research from the 1950s, marketing bullshit from multinational corporations and promotes foodstuffs that have only been cultivated for 10,000 years.
But the foundation to good health is a diet that is 2.5 million years old.
For 99.6% of the time humans have been on the planet we ate a diet that enabled us to thrive. In the last 50 years, that diet has changed beyond recognition. Altered to the point where commercial farming and manufacturers have convinced us to eat foodstuffs our ancestors wouldn’t even recognise as food.
Much more of what we eat and drink today is making us ill, if not shortening our life and is definitely going to affect the health of our brain.
The good news is you can change that fate, simply by changing how you eat, exercise and live.
Assorted genes throughout your body are constantly building critical protein structures and enzyme pathways and repairing, regenerating, and sometimes even destroying your cells based on the signals they get from their immediate environment.
A complete set of Homo sapiens DNA is contained inside each of the 50 to 60 trillion cells in the body. Approximately 20,000 different genes are located on the DNA strands in each cell.
Genes can be viewed as an assortment of "on/off" switches for building the protein molecules that influence every element of body function and structure.
Gene switches turn on or off according to signals received from their environment. You can manipulate and optimise gene expression through foods, workouts, and lifestyle behaviours.
Genes don't know or care whether these environmental signals promote or compromise your health; they simply react to each stimulus in an effort to promote your immediate survival.
Familial genes determine fixed heritable traits, such as eye, hair, and skin colour, and even predispositions to obesity, heart disease, cancer, athletic performance, mathematical or musical aptitude, and so on. Negative familial predispositions can be overcome by adhering to evolutionary-based lifestyle behaviours that promote optimal Homo sapiens gene expression. This notion is the essence of the Primal Blueprint philosophy.
We can reprogram our genes in the direction of health by adhering to the 10 Primal Blueprint laws that drove human evolution: eat plants and animals and avoid modern processed foods (including grains); combine frequent low-level movement with brief, intense strength and sprint workouts; get adequate sunlight, sleep, playtime, and intellectual stimulation; and avoid stupid mistakes.
The advent of civilisation allowed society to progress from a primitive hunter-gatherer existence, but this change came at a severe cost to human health. This decline in health has accelerated in the past century of extreme technological progress. Today, hectic modern life has rendered fewer people physically active, more people stressed by lack of sufficient sleep and general relaxation, and still more inclined to consume heavily processed chemically altered foods.
Primal humans were exceptional physical specimens who lived their entire lives, by necessity, in peak health and physical condition. In survival of the fittest environmental selection pressure, those who were weak, sick, or lacking intelligence were not able to reproduce successfully. Hence, these genes were eliminated in favour of healthy, strong, smart genes.
‘Familial genes’ determine fixed heritable traits, such as eye, hair, and skin colour, and even predispositions to athletic performance, mathematical or musical aptitude, and so on. Even obesity, heart disease dementia, and cancer.
A genetic predisposition does not mean you are predetermined to express that genetic trait. Negative familial predispositions can be overcome by adhering to evolutionary-based lifestyle behaviours that promote optimal Homo sapiens gene expression. Optimising your health potential requires maximising your personal genetic potential.
Genes can be viewed as an assortment of "on/off" switches that influence every element of body function and structure.
Genes don't know or care whether these environmental signals promote or compromise your health; they simply react to each stimulus in an effort to promote your immediate survival.
Gene switches turn on or off according to signals received from their environment. You can manipulate and optimise gene expression through foods, workouts, and lifestyle behaviours.
We help people optimise gene expression for a longer healthier lifespan through a number of services that provide education and support on nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle strategies that embrace a more primal, ancestral way of living.
Our services can help with everything from losing weight, to reducing stress, to gaining more energy, even to helping manage chronic illnesses.
Using a Health Coach has been proven to have numerous benefits such as:
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Increase energy
Accelerate weight loss
Improve cognitive function
Improve emotional status
Improve strength and stamina
Improve stress and sleep