Can working with a health coach make a difference to your wellbeing and get you to change your habits? Editor-in-Chief Katy Sunnassee finds out as she works with Suzy Glaskie to make tweaks to her daily routine.
WORDS: KATY SUNNASSEE.
There are numerous types of coach (no, not the vehicles!), with perhaps the best-known ones being life coaches. Life coaching originated, as with most popular health trends, in the USA back in the 1980s. It rose to popularity here in the UK in the 1990s when a wealth of these (mostly) newly trained cheerleaders sprang to prominence, all promising to improve our lives in various ways, from getting organised and less cluttered, to achieving our work/finance goals or getting happier.
But while you’ve no doubt heard of a life coach, how about a health coach? This relatively new branch of coaching sprang up – you guessed it – in the US just a few years ago. Over there it’s taken off and although still relatively new in the UK, the number of health coaches here is growing exponentially – but what is it, exactly?
‘Health coaching differs from life coaching in that, as you’d expect from the name, we focus on empowering people to make small, sustainable changes to their physical health and emotional wellbeing,’ says Suzy Glaskie, a functional medicine health coach and founder of Peppermint Wellness (peppermintwellness.com).
Functional medicine health coaching grew out of two fields: functional medicine and positive psychology (stemming from humanistic psychology). It was first pioneered in 2014 and there are now more than 4,000 certified functional medicine health coaches worldwide, including a good few hundred in the UK.
And where other health specialists that train in one modality might have a narrower view, health coaches take a wide-angle look at variety of lifestyle factors that can either support or undermine your health. ‘A health coach will look, for example, at what, when and how you eat; how you move, sleep, rest and play; how you manage stress; the impact of your relationships and social connections; the nature and quality of the environment in which you live, and even whether you have purpose and meaning in your life,’ says Suzy.
‘Life coaching can be broad in terms of what you cover, but with health coaching it’s more targeted to how the person is feeling both in body and mind, and about finding workable strategies they can implement to make healthy habits stick.
‘These could be simple things such as creating cues to remind them to drink enough water, or creat
