Nutrition Coaching
Eating a healthy and balanced diet is NOT about following strict and unrealistic diet plans, obsessing about calories, or depriving yourself of the foods you love. It is about eating the type of food that will help you meet your nutritional needs. It is also about helping you feel and look your best now and beyond.
There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to achieving better health, and for this reason, prior to initiating the coaching process, we will first assess your needs, likely limitations, and goals.
What is the job of a Nutrition Coach?
As a certified Nutrition Coach, it is my job to facilitate the implementation of health promoting eating habits, and to empower you to support and care for your body taking into consideration your unique lifestyle, goals, and preferences. Along with coaching you on WHAT to eat and why, I will help you practice HOW to eat and how to build and maintain a lifestyle and environment that supports good nutrition and overall wellbeing. The coaching process is a skills-development process. Fundamentally, I will be your partner in change.
I am trained to help you:
- Establish health-building skills related not only to WHAT you eat, but also HOW you eat.
- Build a foundation of core nutrition skills - behaviours that can be improved on with time and practice, that will benefit you now and for the rest of your life.
- Support and care for your body with good nutrition, and information based on clear, credible, and evidence-based sources.
- Troubleshoot and identify opportunities for improvements without resorting to extremes.
Things that fall outside my scope of practice, and I am unable to help with:
- Testing for allergies or food intolerances.
- Prescribing or devising dietary plans.
- Providing diagnosis or treatment recommendations.
- Interpreting laboratory results.
- Recommending or selling supplements.
- Providing psychotherapy.
Please get in touch if you need a referral for a Dietician or Nutritionist, who may be able to help with the above.
Skill Development Focused Coaching
What does the coaching process look like?
NUTRITION SKILLS ARE LIFE SKILLS
The coaching process is designed to help you implement behaviour-based goals and skills through practice, and with the support and encouragement you need to stay accountable.
What are the steps in the Coaching Process:
STEP #1: Schedule your free of cost (or obligation) Coaching Assessment Call: BOOK HERE . Cannot find a time-slot that works for you? Please send me an e-mail at info@vivianehoeger.ch and I'll provide you with different options according to your availability.
STEP # 2: Either in person or online, we will complete a screening for risk factors and health conditions, and complete a 'readiness for change' assessment. This is so I can get to know you as a person. We will talk about your current eating habits, challenges, and opportunities, and well as lifestyle habits that may influence your eating habits such as stress, sleep, and your home-environment. Think of it as a friendly and impartial conversation.
STEP # 3: Define your outcome-based goals (e.g. improving overall health, eating adequate amounts of macronutrients, weight loss, etc), and agree on behaviour-based goals that will help you achieve your goals. We will also decide what the coaching process could/should look like for you, such as frequency of coaching sessions and skill/habit and accountability tracking options.
What are behaviour-based goals?
Behaviour-based goals outline a specific behaviour that you’re ready, willing, and able to implement repeatedly within a given timeframe that will make your desired outcome more likely.
What kind of SKILLS can I expect to gain during the coaching process?
Together we will work on building a foundation of CORE NUTRITIONAL SKILLS that include BASIC SKILLS, so WHAT to eat and as well as SKILLS FOR LIFE, or HOW to eat.
BASIC SKILLS: Ensuring Food and Nutritional Quality
Throughout the coaching process, the emphasis will be on building life-long skills. We will start with nutrition basics by covering 'Food and Nutritional Quality'. You can expect to learn to:
- Easily identify nutrient-dense foods and minimally-processed foods.
- Build a menu of foods you like, will eat, can tolerate, and know how to prepare.
- Apply shortcuts and easy hacks for minimally processed foods.
- Identify highly processed foods by teaching you how to read food labels like a pro.
- Identify which foods are more and less important to you based on culture, practices, and preferences.
- Use a "handy" trick for portion sizes that doesn't required weighing food.
- Understand and identify what foods are high in protein and why protein matters.
- Understand and identify which foods are high in healthy fats and why healthy fats are crucial for our health.
- Build a shopping list and menu of complex carbohydrates you like, will eat, can tolerate and know how to prepare.
- Prioritise gut health and the role of resistant starch.
- Build a hydration strategy.
- Explore alcohol intake (when applicable).
SKILLS FOR LIFE: Navigating Eating Behaviours
As a Nutrition Coach, it is my job to help you develop the eating skills that support your physiological and psychological health in the long-term and FOR LIFE. It is my job to help you build adaptive, healthful, and mindful eating skills and daily life behaviours.
These will support you in:
- Consciously choosing foods that support your health and goals.
- Feeling calm and confident about your food choices.
- Rolling with both life and body changes, knowing that your skills are robust and resilient.
- Feeling more connected to your body, values, and priorities.
- Building a relationship with food and eating, and yourself, that is supporting, self-caring, honest, and free from judgement, rules, and "shoulds".
Some of the skills I will help you develop include:
- Learning to practice self-care and self-awareness.
- Learning to honour physiological cues.
- Cultivating a heathy food environment.
- Navigating social and relationship dynamics.
That's a lot of potential SKILLS to work on!
The goal is never to do everything perfectly, nor to do it all at once. We will keep the nutrition improvements simple and manageable, ensuring you feel good about the process and never overwhelmed. Together, we will CELEBRATE successes so that they will continue to build on each other. You will have the confidence to accept that slip-ups don't matter in the grand scheme of things, and that consistency beats perfection.
Because we will focus on SKILLS (not rules), you won't be simply following a temporary plan, which provides temporary results (like most commercial diet plans out there). You will develop the capacity to NOURISH AND CARE FOR YOURSELF for life.