COACHING
Can working with a health coach, either in a group or one to one, really make a difference to your wellbeing and get you to make positive changes to your habit s and lifestyle? Top Santé Editorial Director Katy Sunnassee joins a course to find out.
HAVE YOU EVER worked with a coach? Perhaps a personal trainer, or a business coach? If so, you’ll know how helpful it can be. There are numerous types of coaches, and perhaps the best-known one is a life coach.
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 offering to improve our lives in various ways, from getting organised, to focusing on our goals or feeling happier.
While you’ve probably heard of a life coach, how about a health coach? This relatively new branch of coaching sprang up – you guessed it – in the USA a few years ago.
Over there it’s taken off and, although still relatively new in the UK, the number of health coaches is growing exponentially by the year – but what is it, exactly?
‘Health coaching differs from life coaching in that, as you’d expect from the name, we focus on empower ing people to make small, sustainable changes to their lifestyle that lead to a transformation in their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing,’ says Suzy Glaskie, a f unctional medicine health coach and founder of Peppermint Wellness (pepper m int wel lness.co.u k).
‘Life coaching can be pretty 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 strateg ies 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 creating a new habit of putting away their phone an hour before bed. Or it might be setting a challenge to eat a greater variety of d if ferentcoloured vegetables and fruit each day,’ says Suzy.
So far so obvious, right? I mean, we all know we’re meant to drink 1.5 litres of water a day, and “eat the rainbow”. If you’re a regular reader of this magazine, you’ll know all these things, as well as why it ’s important not to look at a screen close to bedtime (just in case you’re a new subscriber and have missed those articles, it’s due to the blue light they emit, which interrupts your product ion of the hormone melatonin, inhibiting you from sleep). If you’re already pretty clued up on how to be hea lthy – and let ’s be clear the information is out there, it’s not like we’re not swimming in a sea of health tips online, on social media and in traditional magazines – why can’t we just make these changes ourselves? Why pay someone to tel
