Why I am a Life Coach & Nutritionist
Someone sent me a DM a few weeks back after I changed my Instagram bio to Stephanie Dodier, Life Coach and Nutritionist.
This person was curious why I call myself a life coach.
I grabbed my note app and started writing why… and then I sent her back a voice memo. She responded back that this was the most insightful perspective on health coaching.
So I thought if this is helpful to her… maybe for you too, it will be.
Why I am a Life Coach & Nutritionist
In this podcast episode, I’m going to share with you 7 reasons why I’m a life coach and nutritionist.
It’s really 7 moments in my career that caused me to rethink the way I was delivering nutrition and health.
Ready? Let’s do this.
What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Why I am a Life Coach & Nutritionist:
- 7 moments in the last 10 years that lead me to coaching
- Why a client crying in a session triggered me to do some deep work
- That determined Why going beyond the food requires life coaching skills
- Being able to answer this question, “I don’t know why I just can’t do it. What’s wrong with me?” is everything now.
Mentioned in the show:
Going Beyond The Food Challenge
Non-Diet Coaching Certification
Transcript:
Undiet Your Coaching 79: Why I Am a Life Coach & Nutritionist in 7 ways
Welcome back to the podcast, my dear colleague. I'm so happy to have you here. I hope you're doing well. Today, I wanna answer a question that came to me by a social media, and it's something that I've been wanting to explore for quite a while, but I've never put it on the podcast. So let's do this.
Why am I a life coach and a nutritionist? And that question came from actually Instagram because I, a few months ago, change the name of my account, you know, right below your picture, you have a bunch of words that best describe what you do, and I added the word life coach and nutritionist. And I guess I got notice and somebody sent me that question, why do I call myself a life coach? And I asked myself that question before answering to the follower, and I went into my oath half of my phone, I'm like, why did I do that? And I went back about five years into my career, and I traced back seven moments in my career as a nutritionist who worked exclusively with the non diet approach as to what led me to become a coach to incorporate life coaching in my work with people.
And I wanna share these with you today because I think it's going to help some of you find the answer to what is happening in your own career, in your own business, in your own work with your client. The struggling point may be the block you are facing with your client and what the answer could be. I'm gonna suggest some things that I have encountered myself and why I came to the conclusion and why do I practice life coaching and nutritional coaching both at the same time. And I wanna start back with Something that's gonna help you understand where I came from, and I've shared this story a number of time on the podcast, so if you've been a witness to that story before, stick with me. It's a client, her name is Carolyn. She was a client of mine, probably, which is today, almost eight to nine years ago, when I had a traditional clinical practice, as a nutritionist in Toronto, a physical location where I would see people, like any other practitioner for one hour appointment, one after the other with the secretary at the front, the whole traditional model. And Carolyn was working with me, which at the time was for weight loss, because that's where I was in my personal journey, right. And she was a reflection of me and she really stumped me and made me realize so many things about myself, things that I didn't wanna admit to myself, things that I was avoiding seeing our client, our teachers. That's what I believe anyway, that our clients are a teacher, and she was one of the most powerful teacher I had because she guided me into the non approach for myself and then what it became for my client and it what it became today beyond the food, this business that I created over the last five years.
But Carolyn came into my office one day, think it was her fourth or fifth appointment. And as she turned the handle, pushed the door to my office, she saw me, she started crying, like bawling uncontrollably because of the shame she felt seeing me to have to tell me that she wasn't able to comply to what I had prescribed to her as far as ways of eating and how much to eat and when to eat, and all the things that traditional nutrition counseling does. And I remember feelings all kinds of things in my own body, shame of me triggering her to have this crying session and pain that she was experiencing in the arm that I was causing her, which at the time I did understand, but now looking back, I can, and I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't have the answer. It wasn't in all my books. All my hours and years of training had no resources for me to handle my client being human and crying and having emotion, and not being able to implement what I was telling them to do.
And that's what pushed me to seek coaching and how to coach. And that's when I came across this concept that what we're trained to do as nutritionist or, and now I know fitness training is the same thing, any kind of technical training that relates to health, we are trying to be consultant. We are trying to tell people what to do, but we are not coach. However, we're being asked to coach people into new behavior, yet we have zero training on how to coach. And that's the first reason, like the seven life-changing moment that led me to life coaching, that's one of them with Carolyn. And that's when I realized I needed to learn how to coach because I was never trained in it, yet that's what I had to do. And how to do it from a place of safety and no longer harming people in doing nutrition work and not being a source of trigger for people and not replicating diet culture in a non diet nutrition counseling, right. I was, fast forward two years, I had adopted the non-AI approach in my own practice, but I had no idea how to deliver it to people that wasn't emulating diet culture, a k a, telling people what to do.
So I had to learn how to coach. And what I quickly is that, when you start learning how to coach, it becomes violently evident that the problem is not food, that the problem is not the body or the weight. The problem is beyond the food and the size of our pants. It's beyond the food. And that's when beyond the food was born.
After learning the basic of coaching, I had no choice but to see the truth. The problem is not the food, and I honestly did not need years of postgraduate training to learn to complicate food for people. What people needed was a different relationship to food, a different way of thinking about food, a different way of thinking about their body, a different way of thinking about health, because what they were getting was making them in a worse situation.
So that's the second reason why I moved towards life coaching, is that I needed tools to coach beyond the food. I needed skills to deal with the reason why people were trying to control food, their relationship problem. Because when you start coaching beyond the food, people start unpacking the real reason why they wanna control food, the real reason why they think they need to be smaller, because of their their own intergenerational trauma from their mom, teaching them how to diet, and now they're very difficult relationship they have with their mom and their need for more boundaries and the people pleasing behavior and their inability to have hard conversation, their difficulty in creating safety within themselves, how to change their habit without willpower.
These are all life skills that they, just like me, weren't taught. I spent years in the educational system, learning all kinds of science stuff and maths and biochemistries and philosophy, but I never learned how to be a human, which is the third reason why I do like coaching now is because I had to learn to be a human and when you coach beyond the food, what you're really doing is coaching how to be a human, how to process your own emotion, how to understand your thoughts, how to create new habits without having to result to willpower. There's a way to do that, but we're never thought that because all we're thought is that you need more discipline and more willpower. You need a checklist, and you need this, then you need that, right, this whole toxic environment. But if you don't do it this way, I have no idea how to teach goal setting or habit formation without the toxic stuff. These are all how to be a human 1 0 1, and what I realize is the clients after clients after clients, just like me, they had no idea how to be a human.
One of the tool that I teach, and I've been teaching that tool for well over six or seven years, called writing the wave of your emotion. It's emotion processing 1 0 1, and we're not talking about deep emotion and traumatic emotion. I'm just talking like basic 1 0 1, emotion, how to feel your emotion, how to process them, and how to release them. We should have been taught that in school. As far as I'm concerned, I should have been taught that in junior high. We was starting to get all the emotion at the age of 14, 15 years old, but no, I was deep knee in science and physics and chemistry. That was more valued by the system I lived in then learning how to process my emotions.
So now I'm in counseling, I'm a nutritionist, and when I ask people, let's go beyond the food, poof. The reason why they're binge eating is because they're overwhelmed with their emotion and they don't know what to do with it. So they binge to numb all the sensation in their body. What am I gonna do? I have to learn to do that for myself so I can teach them.
And then reason number four, I'm gonna expand on that, how to do that without causing more harm and how to do that, being able to detect when it's something bigger, when it's caused by a traumatic experience in their past, when it's outta scope for me, when they need someone beyond life coaching, when they need therapy, when they need to be referred out. Because I made a few mistake along the way of learning how to be a coach and learning how to coach people and learning how to be a human and teachingthat to people and realize that, whoa, some people like, I'm teaching them how to process their emotion, but whoa, like they need way more than me. And I'm actually causing them more pain by teaching them how to process their emotions.
So how am I going to do this kind of coaching in what I now know, a trauma informed way? And that's the fourth reason why I went to life coaching in a trauma informed way not just, what I realized is the standard life coaching is not deep enough or informed enough in the context of helping women releasing that culture for some of my client. What I went into, I went into studying a trauma informed process, not to be the one processing trauma with Kline because that's how to scope. And quite honestly, that's not my field of interests, how to recognize it and how to help through coaching people in a safe way.
And I came to realize that because of my own journey with body Image. I remember being in that program that was teaching how to unpack trauma for yourself. And I was doing work and I was going to a coaching call and I was sharing my experience. And unpacking my body image. And I remember the coach, through Zoom looking at me and says, the way you're talking about your body image, the way you're talking about you accepting your body feels almost like your body is a trauma in itself. And then it just, I had a wave in that moment where she said that, you know, when you're told something and you know it's true for you, like I had a wave of shiver to my whole body. I'm like, oh my God, that's what it is. In my case, 25 years of me being dissatisfied with my body and shaming myself and my body, and being all about why my body is wrong, my body became a trauma. And here's the where it like it's, so powerful and not necessarily a positive way, but you know, you live with that trauma 24 7. How do I deal with that knowingly that it's not just me. It's a percentage of my client that relate to their body as a trauma. How do I build a process to help people from that perspective? And that is nowhere in all the years of training in science or nutrition, that's not what we're being taught. So I had to go to coaching for that. I had to learn how to do that, to do coaching, understand my limitation, how to see it, how to refer out, and how to approach body image in a way where the body was a source of trauma.
The fifth reason why I'm fully sitting and so grateful to have learned life coaching is that question that came over and over and over, and I'm sure you're hearing that from your client as well, which is, I don't know why, but I just can't do it. Give you an example. I know I should be eating when I'm hungry and stop when full, but I just can't do it. What's wrong with me?
I'm sure you've heard that dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds of time. What do you do with that question slash statement in your session? How do you answer what's wrong with me? Do you, in the beginning, eight years ago, I would change subject because I didn't know how to handle that. And then I went through the first few coaching course I took, which was positive reinforcement. No, nothing is wrong with you. Right? And I realized that wasn't working for me. That was, I felt like I was denying myself something and then I realized, it's true. Some people just like me, believe that something is wrong with them, but it's not their fault. It's DI culture. It's patriarchy. It's racism. It's the identities they live in. How do I incorporate that in my coaching with my client? How do I incorporate their identities, their oppression that they have encountered in that forms in part the reason why they're binging, the reason why they overexercise. How do I become aware of that? How do I ask the right question to pull that out of them, show it to them, and how do we work through that? That's another reason why I incorporated life coaching in a trauma informed way with the lands of intersectionality. And how do I, as a person with privilege, provide intersectional coaching to people that do not have the same privilege as me? How do I hold that safe space for them in their story and their oppression? I had to go and learn that because that comes in when you go beyond the food and you ask people, why do you binge? All these things comes out. That's why I went to a trauma-informed intersectional lands life coaching.
The sixth reason why, the moments that led me to fully own the identity of life coaching, is how do I inspire slash motivate people to do the work without taking responsibility for them, while holding the space for them to do their work and lending them the belief that they can do it? How do I hold that space for people to find their own potential? And that's really life coaching, like that's life coaching. But how do I do that traditional life coaching in a trauma form with an intersectional lands for people.
And the seventh reason why, and that is very recently, probably in the last two years, two to three years, and I realized that the real solution, like the fundamental shift that we need to do as people self-identified as women, to really move out of DI culture and really own our power is self-trust. How do I facilitate coaching in a way that will build up women and their ability to trust themselves? And I realize that for me, when I trust myself, when I know I have my own back, no matter what, I can do anything. And in order for us, let's go back to the basic, to eat intuitively, we need to trust our eating cues. In order for us to trust ourselves with our health promoting habit, we need to trust our body. Right? And especially when you go into the world of body image, we need to facilitate confidence. Confidence comes from our ability to trust ourselves. So how do I help create an environment, how do I provide coaching in a way that will help people build their self trusts. That's why I fully own life coaching and I believe, I'm gonna go as far as to say I believe that any graduate from any nutrition program, any health program that is actually gonna go into the real world, an application, we're not talking perhaps on researcher, but people who are gonna go work with people, with other human, in delivering any kind of health methodology, mental health, physical health, nutrition, need to know how to coach.
We need to know how to coach other human and facilitate these elements and specifically if you're gonna coach a woman. If you're gonna coach a woman, you need to be able to help this, these element grow within your client, and you need to be aware of them, and you need to know how to facilitate them. I know today that coaching in the context of food specifically for women is a thousand time more powerful than any consulting intervention, anyone can do. Learning how to facilitate an environment for women to learn how to have their own relationship to food and how to bring nutrition in their own body, how to work out in a way that's good for them, how to do movement in a way that's good for them, how to care for their mental health in a way that's good for them, how to facilitate an environment where people can develop that for themselves, is a thousand times more powerful than telling people what to do.
And I wanna give you a bonus reason why I believe to that level in life coaching in combination with health coaching. It's because it changed my life. The process of intuitive eating in itself took me so far. It only clicked in when I layered in coaching. And I was able to explore the reason why I was binging, not just you're allowed to eat all the food. That gave me some relief, but that did not solve for the binging. Telling me I need to love my body, why I just need to be neutral about my body, didn't stop what I felt in my gut when I saw myself in the mirror. Coaching did that. Learning how to process my emotion did that. Learning how to unha myself did that. It changed my life. And because I believe in building businesses, building processes, ways of working with people in integrity, in alignment to my value, I had with great pleasure to integrate coaching, integrate life coaching in my work with people and my clients, professionals, and regular folk as well. I just could not live my life that way and not bring it into my work.
So this is why I brought life coaching into my title on Instagram and into my teaching because it changed my life. It changed the life of all my clients I have worked since then, and I firmly believe that it can only do good. It cannot harm people to learn to go beyond the food. It can only move them forward. It may not be the solution for everyone, but based on my own work over the last 10, eight years now, it is a great part of the solution for many, many, many, many women. So I wanted to share that with you today and perhaps if you're, I don't know when you're listening to this, but if you came to the Going Beyond the food challenge, that's what we're gonna dive in. How to go beyond the food with food, how to go beyond the food with body image, how to go beyond the food and setting goals, which are client, because that's what client pay you for, right? To achieve a goal, how to do that safely, how to go beyond the goal and how to apply that in a model of your business where the foundation of it is you trusting yourself.
So perhaps we're in the middle of the challenge, perhaps you're just registering for the challenge, but that is what I'm going to be teaching you and that's what I teach also, obviously, in a non diet coaching certification. So if that kind of work calls you in, because that's your lived experience or because just like me, you went into quote unquote regular practice and realized, holy moly, this is not working, come and work with me inside of the non diet coaching certification and I'll teach you to go beyond the food. I love you and I'll see you on the next podcast.
Undiet Your Coaching 79: Why I Am a Life Coach & Nutritionist in 7 ways
Welcome back to the podcast, my dear colleague. I’m so happy to have you here. I hope you’re doing well. Today, I wanna answer a question that came to me by a social media, and it’s something that I’ve been wanting to explore for quite a while, but I’ve never put it on the podcast. So let’s do this.
Why am I a life coach and a nutritionist? And that question came from actually Instagram because I, a few months ago, change the name of my account, you know, right below your picture, you have a bunch of words that best describe what you do, and I added the word life coach and nutritionist. And I guess I got notice and somebody sent me that question, why do I call myself a life coach? And I asked myself that question before answering to the follower, and I went into my oath half of my phone, I’m like, why did I do that? And I went back about five years into my career, and I traced back seven moments in my career as a nutritionist who worked exclusively with the non diet approach as to what led me to become a coach to incorporate life coaching in my work with people.
And I wanna share these with you today because I think it’s going to help some of you find the answer to what is happening in your own career, in your own business, in your own work with your client. The struggling point may be the block you are facing with your client and what the answer could be. I’m gonna suggest some things that I have encountered myself and why I came to the conclusion and why do I practice life coaching and nutritional coaching both at the same time. And I wanna start back with Something that’s gonna help you understand where I came from, and I’ve shared this story a number of time on the podcast, so if you’ve been a witness to that story before, stick with me. It’s a client, her name is Carolyn. She was a client of mine, probably, which is today, almost eight to nine years ago, when I had a traditional clinical practice, as a nutritionist in Toronto, a physical location where I would see people, like any other practitioner for one hour appointment, one after the other with the secretary at the front, the whole traditional model. And Carolyn was working with me, which at the time was for weight loss, because that’s where I was in my personal journey, right. And she was a reflection of me and she really stumped me and made me realize so many things about myself, things that I didn’t wanna admit to myself, things that I was avoiding seeing our client, our teachers. That’s what I believe anyway, that our clients are a teacher, and she was one of the most powerful teacher I had because she guided me into the non approach for myself and then what it became for my client and it what it became today beyond the food, this business that I created over the last five years.
But Carolyn came into my office one day, think it was her fourth or fifth appointment. And as she turned the handle, pushed the door to my office, she saw me, she started crying, like bawling uncontrollably because of the shame she felt seeing me to have to tell me that she wasn’t able to comply to what I had prescribed to her as far as ways of eating and how much to eat and when to eat, and all the things that traditional nutrition counseling does. And I remember feelings all kinds of things in my own body, shame of me triggering her to have this crying session and pain that she was experiencing in the arm that I was causing her, which at the time I did understand, but now looking back, I can, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t have the answer. It wasn’t in all my books. All my hours and years of training had no resources for me to handle my client being human and crying and having emotion, and not being able to implement what I was telling them to do.
And that’s what pushed me to seek coaching and how to coach. And that’s when I came across this concept that what we’re trained to do as nutritionist or, and now I know fitness training is the same thing, any kind of technical training that relates to health, we are trying to be consultant. We are trying to tell people what to do, but we are not coach. However, we’re being asked to coach people into new behavior, yet we have zero training on how to coach. And that’s the first reason, like the seven life-changing moment that led me to life coaching, that’s one of them with Carolyn. And that’s when I realized I needed to learn how to coach because I was never trained in it, yet that’s what I had to do. And how to do it from a place of safety and no longer harming people in doing nutrition work and not being a source of trigger for people and not replicating diet culture in a non diet nutrition counseling, right. I was, fast forward two years, I had adopted the non-AI approach in my own practice, but I had no idea how to deliver it to people that wasn’t emulating diet culture, a k a, telling people what to do.
So I had to learn how to coach. And what I quickly is that, when you start learning how to coach, it becomes violently evident that the problem is not food, that the problem is not the body or the weight. The problem is beyond the food and the size of our pants. It’s beyond the food. And that’s when beyond the food was born.
After learning the basic of coaching, I had no choice but to see the truth. The problem is not the food, and I honestly did not need years of postgraduate training to learn to complicate food for people. What people needed was a different relationship to food, a different way of thinking about food, a different way of thinking about their body, a different way of thinking about health, because what they were getting was making them in a worse situation.
So that’s the second reason why I moved towards life coaching, is that I needed tools to coach beyond the food. I needed skills to deal with the reason why people were trying to control food, their relationship problem. Because when you start coaching beyond the food, people start unpacking the real reason why they wanna control food, the real reason why they think they need to be smaller, because of their their own intergenerational trauma from their mom, teaching them how to diet, and now they’re very difficult relationship they have with their mom and their need for more boundaries and the people pleasing behavior and their inability to have hard conversation, their difficulty in creating safety within themselves, how to change their habit without willpower.
These are all life skills that they, just like me, weren’t taught. I spent years in the educational system, learning all kinds of science stuff and maths and biochemistries and philosophy, but I never learned how to be a human, which is the third reason why I do like coaching now is because I had to learn to be a human and when you coach beyond the food, what you’re really doing is coaching how to be a human, how to process your own emotion, how to understand your thoughts, how to create new habits without having to result to willpower. There’s a way to do that, but we’re never thought that because all we’re thought is that you need more discipline and more willpower. You need a checklist, and you need this, then you need that, right, this whole toxic environment. But if you don’t do it this way, I have no idea how to teach goal setting or habit formation without the toxic stuff. These are all how to be a human 1 0 1, and what I realize is the clients after clients after clients, just like me, they had no idea how to be a human.
One of the tool that I teach, and I’ve been teaching that tool for well over six or seven years, called writing the wave of your emotion. It’s emotion processing 1 0 1, and we’re not talking about deep emotion and traumatic emotion. I’m just talking like basic 1 0 1, emotion, how to feel your emotion, how to process them, and how to release them. We should have been taught that in school. As far as I’m concerned, I should have been taught that in junior high. We was starting to get all the emotion at the age of 14, 15 years old, but no, I was deep knee in science and physics and chemistry. That was more valued by the system I lived in then learning how to process my emotions.
So now I’m in counseling, I’m a nutritionist, and when I ask people, let’s go beyond the food, poof. The reason why they’re binge eating is because they’re overwhelmed with their emotion and they don’t know what to do with it. So they binge to numb all the sensation in their body. What am I gonna do? I have to learn to do that for myself so I can teach them.
And then reason number four, I’m gonna expand on that, how to do that without causing more harm and how to do that, being able to detect when it’s something bigger, when it’s caused by a traumatic experience in their past, when it’s outta scope for me, when they need someone beyond life coaching, when they need therapy, when they need to be referred out. Because I made a few mistake along the way of learning how to be a coach and learning how to coach people and learning how to be a human and teachingthat to people and realize that, whoa, some people like, I’m teaching them how to process their emotion, but whoa, like they need way more than me. And I’m actually causing them more pain by teaching them how to process their emotions.
So how am I going to do this kind of coaching in what I now know, a trauma informed way? And that’s the fourth reason why I went to life coaching in a trauma informed way not just, what I realized is the standard life coaching is not deep enough or informed enough in the context of helping women releasing that culture for some of my client. What I went into, I went into studying a trauma informed process, not to be the one processing trauma with Kline because that’s how to scope. And quite honestly, that’s not my field of interests, how to recognize it and how to help through coaching people in a safe way.
And I came to realize that because of my own journey with body Image. I remember being in that program that was teaching how to unpack trauma for yourself. And I was doing work and I was going to a coaching call and I was sharing my experience. And unpacking my body image. And I remember the coach, through Zoom looking at me and says, the way you’re talking about your body image, the way you’re talking about you accepting your body feels almost like your body is a trauma in itself. And then it just, I had a wave in that moment where she said that, you know, when you’re told something and you know it’s true for you, like I had a wave of shiver to my whole body. I’m like, oh my God, that’s what it is. In my case, 25 years of me being dissatisfied with my body and shaming myself and my body, and being all about why my body is wrong, my body became a trauma. And here’s the where it like it’s, so powerful and not necessarily a positive way, but you know, you live with that trauma 24 7. How do I deal with that knowingly that it’s not just me. It’s a percentage of my client that relate to their body as a trauma. How do I build a process to help people from that perspective? And that is nowhere in all the years of training in science or nutrition, that’s not what we’re being taught. So I had to go to coaching for that. I had to learn how to do that, to do coaching, understand my limitation, how to see it, how to refer out, and how to approach body image in a way where the body was a source of trauma.
The fifth reason why I’m fully sitting and so grateful to have learned life coaching is that question that came over and over and over, and I’m sure you’re hearing that from your client as well, which is, I don’t know why, but I just can’t do it. Give you an example. I know I should be eating when I’m hungry and stop when full, but I just can’t do it. What’s wrong with me?
I’m sure you’ve heard that dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds of time. What do you do with that question slash statement in your session? How do you answer what’s wrong with me? Do you, in the beginning, eight years ago, I would change subject because I didn’t know how to handle that. And then I went through the first few coaching course I took, which was positive reinforcement. No, nothing is wrong with you. Right? And I realized that wasn’t working for me. That was, I felt like I was denying myself something and then I realized, it’s true. Some people just like me, believe that something is wrong with them, but it’s not their fault. It’s DI culture. It’s patriarchy. It’s racism. It’s the identities they live in. How do I incorporate that in my coaching with my client? How do I incorporate their identities, their oppression that they have encountered in that forms in part the reason why they’re binging, the reason why they overexercise. How do I become aware of that? How do I ask the right question to pull that out of them, show it to them, and how do we work through that? That’s another reason why I incorporated life coaching in a trauma informed way with the lands of intersectionality. And how do I, as a person with privilege, provide intersectional coaching to people that do not have the same privilege as me? How do I hold that safe space for them in their story and their oppression? I had to go and learn that because that comes in when you go beyond the food and you ask people, why do you binge? All these things comes out. That’s why I went to a trauma-informed intersectional lands life coaching.
The sixth reason why, the moments that led me to fully own the identity of life coaching, is how do I inspire slash motivate people to do the work without taking responsibility for them, while holding the space for them to do their work and lending them the belief that they can do it? How do I hold that space for people to find their own potential? And that’s really life coaching, like that’s life coaching. But how do I do that traditional life coaching in a trauma form with an intersectional lands for people.
And the seventh reason why, and that is very recently, probably in the last two years, two to three years, and I realized that the real solution, like the fundamental shift that we need to do as people self-identified as women, to really move out of DI culture and really own our power is self-trust. How do I facilitate coaching in a way that will build up women and their ability to trust themselves? And I realize that for me, when I trust myself, when I know I have my own back, no matter what, I can do anything. And in order for us, let’s go back to the basic, to eat intuitively, we need to trust our eating cues. In order for us to trust ourselves with our health promoting habit, we need to trust our body. Right? And especially when you go into the world of body image, we need to facilitate confidence. Confidence comes from our ability to trust ourselves. So how do I help create an environment, how do I provide coaching in a way that will help people build their self trusts. That’s why I fully own life coaching and I believe, I’m gonna go as far as to say I believe that any graduate from any nutrition program, any health program that is actually gonna go into the real world, an application, we’re not talking perhaps on researcher, but people who are gonna go work with people, with other human, in delivering any kind of health methodology, mental health, physical health, nutrition, need to know how to coach.
We need to know how to coach other human and facilitate these elements and specifically if you’re gonna coach a woman. If you’re gonna coach a woman, you need to be able to help this, these element grow within your client, and you need to be aware of them, and you need to know how to facilitate them. I know today that coaching in the context of food specifically for women is a thousand time more powerful than any consulting intervention, anyone can do. Learning how to facilitate an environment for women to learn how to have their own relationship to food and how to bring nutrition in their own body, how to work out in a way that’s good for them, how to do movement in a way that’s good for them, how to care for their mental health in a way that’s good for them, how to facilitate an environment where people can develop that for themselves, is a thousand times more powerful than telling people what to do.
And I wanna give you a bonus reason why I believe to that level in life coaching in combination with health coaching. It’s because it changed my life. The process of intuitive eating in itself took me so far. It only clicked in when I layered in coaching. And I was able to explore the reason why I was binging, not just you’re allowed to eat all the food. That gave me some relief, but that did not solve for the binging. Telling me I need to love my body, why I just need to be neutral about my body, didn’t stop what I felt in my gut when I saw myself in the mirror. Coaching did that. Learning how to process my emotion did that. Learning how to unha myself did that. It changed my life. And because I believe in building businesses, building processes, ways of working with people in integrity, in alignment to my value, I had with great pleasure to integrate coaching, integrate life coaching in my work with people and my clients, professionals, and regular folk as well. I just could not live my life that way and not bring it into my work.
So this is why I brought life coaching into my title on Instagram and into my teaching because it changed my life. It changed the life of all my clients I have worked since then, and I firmly believe that it can only do good. It cannot harm people to learn to go beyond the food. It can only move them forward. It may not be the solution for everyone, but based on my own work over the last 10, eight years now, it is a great part of the solution for many, many, many, many women. So I wanted to share that with you today and perhaps if you’re, I don’t know when you’re listening to this, but if you came to the Going Beyond the food challenge, that’s what we’re gonna dive in. How to go beyond the food with food, how to go beyond the food with body image, how to go beyond the food and setting goals, which are client, because that’s what client pay you for, right? To achieve a goal, how to do that safely, how to go beyond the goal and how to apply that in a model of your business where the foundation of it is you trusting yourself.
So perhaps we’re in the middle of the challenge, perhaps you’re just registering for the challenge, but that is what I’m going to be teaching you and that’s what I teach also, obviously, in a non diet coaching certification. So if that kind of work calls you in, because that’s your lived experience or because just like me, you went into quote unquote regular practice and realized, holy moly, this is not working, come and work with me inside of the non diet coaching certification and I’ll teach you to go beyond the food. I love you and I’ll see you on the next podcast.
