When only 12% of Canadians are metabolically healthy, it’s time to find out what a health coach is.
Here’s an answer:
“All Health Coaches share an essential characteristic; they want people to achieve their best possible health, and their best possible life.”
Isn’t that, however, the same as other professions (doctors, nurses, chiropractors, dieticians, personal trainers) in the health and wellness industry?
It is, however the key difference is how helping people is actually accomplished.
The other professions share one thing in common, which is that they tell you what to do, and what not to.
They all follow what is referred to as the “expert model” of care, and it’s often carried out in a clinic, office or gym.
The alternative is the Health Coaching model, which utilises a motivational approach with people, is based on decades of behavioural research and asserts that healthy behavioural changes are both possible, and sustainable, when aligned with beliefs, values and priorities.
These 3 things encompass the deep-rooted reasons we do the things we do …
also known as our why.
With health coaching the focus is always on facilitating change with their clients, or patients … about exploration, support and accountability.
When clients are empowered to see themselves as experts in their own health, and circumstances, they can communicate their needs, are highly involved in the decision making process, and learn how to build habits, set goals and experiment with what might work in their day-to-day life.
The goal is a shift towards a healthy lifestyle.
People are actually taught how to optimally take care of their own health, importantly how to do so when faced with many of the challenges, and temptations, we face every single day.
Right now, Canada faces a chronic disease epidemic, which is a lifestyle epidemic.
This is why Health Coaching is a rapidly emerging, evidence-based preventive medical field that collaborates, and complements, the care received by traditional medicine.
Working together, these collaborative fields offer the collaborative, operational template that BC’s Health Care System so desperately needs right now.
I don’t pretend that introducing Health Coaching into the primary care system would solve the multi-dimensional problems the BC Health Care system now faces.
What it would do, however, is help highlight the health-related concerns of today’s lifestyle, emphasize the importance of self-directed, preventive medicine in today’s primary care system, and it would be a START with regards to helping people learn how to optimally take care of their own health.