Coach Clients on Maximal Nutrition_Final

>> Hi there. Hippocrates once said, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." As a Health Coach, you know that immense healing power food can have. In this module, you will learn how to maximize nutrition for hormonal health. To do this, we'll look at foods in terms of macronutrients, fats, carbs, and proteins and how you can leverage each macronutrient to help your clients balance their hormones. Nutrition is such a fundamental aspect of hormonal health. As an expert in this field, this is the kind of information your clients will come to depend on you for. So it's great to be well-versed in this area. No matter what health challenges or hormonal imbalances your clients may experience, everyone can benefit from a boost in nutrition. One thing that's important to remember, as we discuss diet in relation to hormones is that, most of your clients will come to you feeling confused and overwhelmed about healing foods. Changes are, they've looked for some information before landing on your doorstep. They've likely googled solutions for what they are experiencing and came up against a ton of information. Some of it conflicting. As you know, there are so many different diets out there. Humans are bio-individual. And there's a lot of misinformation out there on the internet. To make matters even more confusing, you will encounter many clients who've read up on symptoms online and diagnosed themselves because they're feeling certain that what they are experiencing is estrogen dominance, for example. Now you're working with someone who claims they've already tried everything under the sun, but really they were trying to solve the wrong problem. When it comes to their lives and their bodies, your clients are the best experts on themselves. But as a Health Coach, you're their nutrition and health expert. Your clients hold all the clues when it comes to themselves, but it's your job to take this information and decode it. It's important to approach this information with a mind like a blank slate, rather than approach a client with preconceived notions about what's going on for them. When a Coach comes from a place of powerful personal experience with a particular health condition or they swear by certain dietary practices or healing regiments, it opens up the potential for them to create a bias and how they collect an interpret clues. We encourage you to really take the time to familiarize yourself with a variety of healing diets and approaches, not just the one that you personally subscribed to. Maybe you have celiac disease, for example, and you turned your life around with a gluten-free diet. This doesn't mean every client who comes to you with digestive distress has gluten intolerance or would benefit from going gluten-free, too. Even if this was your niche, you'd still want to build your knowledge base about other allergies and conditions, to be sure you're helping everyone how they need to be helped. If it turns out that a client could be best supportive by a different practitioner, you owe it to them to connect them with the help they truly need. At the end of the day, you want to have the highest success rate with the people you worked with, not the largest client roster. So when it comes to balancing hormones, why does a particular way of eating for one client, but not another? The reason is the bio-individuality, which is a concept I'm sure you'll recall from the Health Coach Training Program. To refresh your memory, bio-individuality refers to the biochemical factors that influence our individual behavior, immune functions, mental health, personality, allergic tendencies, tastes, and abilities to process different chemicals. It's commonly agreed upon by health experts that people require variety in their diets. But beyond this, opinions and what constitutes an optimal diet often vary from one expert to the next. How can so many theories exist? Which one's correct? As you have learned, they may all be valid. This is possible because dietary theories typically neglect a huge part of what nutrition is really about, the individual. Most guidelines describe what you should eat without any reference to important factors like, gender, age, lifestyle, or body type. As a Coach, it's your job to clarify that all individuals have their own specific need when it comes to health, and help each individual discover what that is. As an expert in hormone health, it's important to be aware of the vast genetic diversity at the root of a wide variety of health problems, dietary needs and metabolic abilities. Consider this. There are over 70 trillion possible chromosome combinations every time an egg needs a sperm. All of these genetic combinations result in a child who's entirely different from either of her parents or siblings. So it's not surprising that this person has the potential to metabolize their food differently. For instance, genetic abnormalities exist that can hinder hormone health. Several of these gene mutations interfere with the body's ability to metabolize food. For example, people who are born with the MTHFR gene mutation are way more likely to have deficiencies of folate and B12. And beyond the documented mutations like this one, there are many other combinations that haven't yet been studied. While researchers have uncovered so much information about how genes impact hormones, health, and nutrition, there's still so much that we don't know. There was a major recent study involving 800 participants that measure their blood sugar levels after eating. Everyone was fed identical meals, yet blood sugar levels varied significantly from person to person. Using the data obtained from these participants, the authors then created individualized diets for a separate group of 100 participants. The participants in the group with a personalize diets showed significantly more stability in their post-meal blood sugar levels. This all adds up to the fact that diets should always be catered to the needs of the individual, because this course is about hormone balance, we're going to look at the different ways to adjust for each client's hormonal issues as well. One thing to keep in mind as we discuss dietary modifications for your clients is to remember that drastic changes are hard to make and maintain for most people. It's better to make slow, gradual changes that allow the brain to adjust over time. Allow your clients to embrace their own pace, not yours for creating change, so that their diet and lifestyle adjustments become manageable lifelong habits. You will get clients who want relief from their symptoms right away and show up motivated to take on a list of recommendations, but that doesn't mean you should hand them an entire protocol at once. Don't set your clients up to crash and burn. The point is, to help your clients make changes they can work into their lives and stick with long-term. Remember, it's easier for a driver to navigate to a new destination when you give them one step in the directions at a time, rather than a full list of directions before they even back out of the driveway. Create frequent opportunities for wins for your clients to achieve. Emphasize the things they are doing right and praise them for these efforts every step of the way. Positive reinforcement will encourage these modifications to become permanent. It keeps clients motivated and excited about the positive shifts they're making, even when they're challenging. Reminding your clients of all the repercussions of their negative habits and what they are not doing to heal their hormones, creates a doom and gloom attitude and can set clients out for self-pity and sabotage. As we talk about maximizing nutrition in the upcoming lecture, and as you apply this information in your coaching sessions, I encourage you to keep all of these guidelines in mind. To recap what we discussed today, all your clients can benefit from a boost in nutrition, but what's most beneficial in healing varies from person to person. Bio-individuality extends beyond general nutrition. It applies to the healing nutritional protocols we create for hormone balance as well. You can best support your clients by approaching them for clues as a blank slate and familiarizing yourself with a wide variety of healing diets, so that you can create a protocol for healing foods that's tailored specifically to their needs and unique composition. Help them succeed by offering no more than one or two suggestions at a time and creating moments of victory by celebrating and positively reinforcing their wins along the way. Remember, how you help clients adopt a nutritional protocol to help balance their hormones, can be just as important as what is in the protocol itself. Anyone can google diets and information. Your support, encouragement, and empowerment is what will ultimately help your client succeed when it comes to taking control of their hormone health. What's your unique story? Are you interested in this topic because of a personal health challenge that you or someone close to you overcame? What dietary guidelines do you abide by in your life? What have you tried that hasn't worked? I encourage you to share your experiences in the Facebook group. Afterwards, pause to reflect and how your unique experiences may differ from other peoples' stories. Remember this, as you work with clients to help keep personal bias at bay. Thanks so much for joining me. I really enjoyed sharing this information with you. See you soon.