Healthy At Any Weight
This is a health coaching approach for individuals who have struggled with their weight over time. It is not a quick fix for an event like a wedding, it is about prioritising building health over losing weight.
Where there is a weight issue, there is often a history of repeated dieting and weight fluctuation. Research shows that most people who attempt to lose weight by dieting will put the weight back on and gain more over time. Repeated dieting can leave the body depleted in nutrients and appetite signalling can become dysregulated. Before you can lose weight effectively, the body needs to be properly nourished, and the metabolic regulation needs to be rebalanced. This approach is about getting these elements in place with additional exploration of issues that have kept you stuck in a cycle that has never delivered the desired outcome. It is about exploring and understanding your relationship with food and unpacking how to feed, nourish and listen to your body.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
What to Expect
A coach is an agent of positive change, not a prescription provider.
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A deep dive into a full history of eating and weight issues over the course of your lifetime: this is an excellent exercise for seeing the bigger picture and making connections previously unseen.
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Help in understanding the biology of fat use, storage and loss, why most diets fail and how this might apply to you.
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Nourishing the brain and restoring gut signalling function.
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Working with food scripts and body image.
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Help with self-sabotage and unhelpful belief systems.
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Assessing executive functions and identifying where support is needed for behaviour change.
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Appetite sensitivity retraining - where hunger or satiety cues have been over-ridden or egnored for long periods, it can be very difficult to know if you are hungry or full. This needs to be relearned in some individuals.
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Collaboration with creation of sustainable healthy eating habits.
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Sleep - deprivation is a significant driver of weight gain.
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Movement and Exercise advise - getting the balance right.
Additionally Osteopathy can be utilised to help optimise gut function and start to feel cues coming from the gut again. It can also be useful for working with chronic stress and the nervous system which will impact our metabolic system.
I can also work alongside health apps which can help to keep costs down. It can be reassuring to have a nutrition professional to check in with to make sure everything is going as it should and to have any questions answered as well as finding the motivation to keep going.
​Customer Story​
M. came to see me with a desire to lose weight. She had been on numerous diets over her lifetime and had lost weight repeatedly only to gain it back, frequently with additional weight. M. was a very good cook, and her diet initially was exemplary, but what transpired over time was that she was only able to sustain this for about 3 weeks. After that she would crumble and eat a significant amount of sugary treats, falling off the bandwagon for a period of time until she could muster the willpower to get back to her exemplary eating. Together we looked at her executive function skills and found that she had poor response inhibition (impulse control), organisational skills and goal directed persistence. She had very high levels of stress and a working timetable that made it hard for her to be consistent in her food preparation. M. had very high levels of metacognition, the skill that allows you to self-reflect effectively, and she was able to see the patterns of behaviour very quickly and recognise them from other areas in her life also.
She began to see that she ate a very narrow range of foods when being exemplary which were her “safe” foods. She liked the foods, they were healthy and she could prepare delicious meals easily in her busy schedule. However, the repetitive and restrictive nature of this approach triggered her subsequent uncontrolled intake of sugary treats. She learned to broaden her intake of a range of foods that spanned the extremes that she tended to swing between. She began to use her fridge and freezer more effectively to maintain a more regular and diverse intake of nutrients. She felt the urge to binge reduce and her mood and behaviour stabilise. She found that as she was able to maintain this way of eating, she began to lose weight without trying. She did not have a weight target, she did not pressurise herself to be a certain size, she just enjoyed the greater sense of energetic wellbeing and freedom from a repeated cycle in which she had been trapped for many years.