What is a Health Coach?

Health Coaches help people understand how to nourish themselves holistically and coach them toward reaching their goals.

While dietary nutrition and supplementation is discussed, there’s also a focus on non-food forms of nourishment like career, relationships, physical activity, and creativity. Health Coaches assess a client’s overall well-being and together come up with recommendations to help enact basic health-supportive modifications.

How is a Health Coach different than a therapist, psychologist or mental health professional?

A therapist uses mental health tools to analyze, diagnose, and treat mental health behaviors.

A coach serves as an active and supportive listener, utilizing core coaching skills to ask questions that allow clients to discover their own challenges and solutions.

While a therapist often explores one’s past to examine unhealthy thought patterns and influences, a coach focuses primarily on the present and future. Coaches highlight clients’ strengths and help them to make immediate lifestyle changes to work toward their goals.

With that said, I have supported clients who have anxiety or depression alongside therapy. If you are unsure if coaching is right for you, I can help you clarify the right path forward during our free consultation.

How is a Health Coach different than a Life Coach?

Health coaches and life coaches share similar approaches but specialize in different areas.

A life coach is an adviser who helps clients achieve goals by working through problems and making decisions. Like health coaching, life coaching involves examining a client’s life right now to identify obstacles or challenges to living a fulfilled life and then choosing a course of action.

An Integrative Nutrition (IIN) Health Coach focuses on nutrition, physical activity, relationships, career, and spirituality. These elements can impact markers of health such as stress, weight, and energy levels.

The relationship between food and lifestyle and how they both affect health is the primary focus of an IIN coach.

What does “holistic” mean?

Holistic means we will take into consideration you as a whole person when supporting you to reach your goals. As discussed above, an IIN Health Coach takes into consideration various elements of your life in order to understand what is getting in the way of achieving your goals. For example, your state of mind can have an impact on the types of food you eat and your environment can have an effect on the types of exercise you do.