Dieticians and weight loss gurus teach you how to count calories and distinguish between trans and saturated fats, but who do you call when you’re looking to find a healthier balance between food and everyday life?
The answer: a Holistic Food and Wellness Coach, who combines their expertise in life coaching and counseling with their knowledge of nutrition, digestion, and natural health.
These Coaches help you develop a diet that works for your individual body and lifestyle. This can mean grocery shopping, meal and menu planning, or hands-on cooking demonstrations. And here’s the holistic part, since your diet is intimately related to everything else in your life, your coach will also help you foster healthier relationships, find meaning in your professional life, and enrich your creative and spiritual routines so you can thrive in every area of your life.
Does stress in your workplace cause you to overeat? Does lack of sleep prevent you from exercising? As you begin to work together on a customized program, you begin to understand how a balanced diet is about much more than what you put in your mouth. It’s about what nourishes you from the inside out and what feeds you outside of food itself.
Primary Foods
In her latest weight gain confession. Oprah Winfrey spoke about how she looks to food for comfort whenever she feels stressed or off balance. Whenever you have a strong craving to indulge, As a Holistic Wellness Coach I suggest you ask yourself, “What am I really hungry for?” If your belly isn’t rumbling, then close the fridge and find another activity that will nourish you.
When your primary foods are in balance, you have the opportunity to live an extraordinary life. Primary foods? That’s the stuff that doesn’t come on a plate, but that we still need for our health and well-being. These include exercise, healthy relationships, restful sleep, spiritual centering activities and meaningful work or hobbies. What we discover is that when our primary foods are out of balance, so is our relationship to food and our body.
When do you most feel out of balance?
A breakup, career change or even a heated fight with your family member or spouse can have a profound effect on your appetites and tastes.
From a young age, we have each developed our own way of coping by disconnecting from our emotions. We do this through self-sabotaging activities that allow us to temporarily mask our pain and emotions by escaping it. People stuff themselves with food until they are sick or they obsess over the latest fad diets. They max out their credit cards, gamble, smoke, or drink themselves to oblivion. All these methods give them a way out. But the key is:
The way out begins by discovering a way in.
We are often so scared of staying present, because that means being in touch with our body and our emotions. What we need to understand is that when a craving does not come from hunger, eating will never satisfy it. You can eat as much as you want, but if you don’t get to the bottom of what’s eating you, you will forever be looking outside yourself to fill the void.
Author Marc David suggest we begin by checking in with our bodies instead of checking out. He developed the “Holding Technique,” a tool I use to teach my clients about getting present, listening to their bodies and the emotional signals it sends them. Here’s how it works:
- Stop what you are about to do (hold off on opening the fridge, or smoking that cigarette)
- Find a quiet spot to sit down (away from the kitchen)
- Take a few deep breaths from your belly, close your eyes.
- Ask yourself big questions: “What is going on here?” “What am I feeling?” What am I really hungry for?”
