What’s Strategic Nutrition Coaching?

Are you tired of trying every new diet?

Before training as a psychologist, I trained as a dietitian.

I did my internship in an Outpatient Clinic in Barcelona and in the Tarrasa Hospital. Then I started practicing Privately and with some Herbalists. I also collaborated with the Department of Education of the Generalitat.

As I’d training in psychotherapy, I used to help my clients when some emotional blockage prevented them from progressing in their diet.

Later, when I was trained in Strategic coaching,  I understood that I could use this methodology and apply it with my clients who wanted to lose weight, and that’s how strategic nutritional coaching came about.

What’s Strategic Nutrition Coaching?

Coaching is a process by which certain objectives are established, which the person wants to achieve, and which start from the place they’re at.

In Nutritional Coaching, these objectives focus on the person’s nutrition.

And, why strategic?

Because it’s Coaching based on the strategic brief therapy methodology and uses its resources to help the person achieve their objectives in the fastest and most effective way possible.

What does it involve?

Step 1: Defining your objective

As I’ve mentioned several times, this definition has to be concrete, measurable, positive, realistic and timed.

You need to ask yourself:

What do I want?

And write your goal realistically.

In general, one can lose about 500g per week.

This may vary depending on your fluid retention. Although the week before or during menstruation, women lose no weight, but they usually lose it later.

A concrete and realistic objective could be, for example, “losing 6 kilograms between April and Junie”.

Step 2: challenge or problem?

I’d like to explain the difference between a challenge and a problem.

When you set a challenge for yourself :

• You decide your goal
• You create the steps that will lead you to it
• Then you create the necessary tasks to achieve it
• Then you act

In principle, if you’ve set a realistic goal for yourself, you’ll achieve it, if you follow the necessary actions to do so, in the required time.

But imagine that you set yourself a challenge and then a problem arises.

A problem is an obstacle that prevents you from overcoming a challenge.

For example,

• Imagine that you want to lose weight, but every time you feel anxious, you eat to decrease your anxiety.
• Every time you feel sad, you eat for comfort.

In that case, having well-defined goals or tasks will be useless, as if any problems arise in the way, they’ll prevent you from carrying them out.

That’s when the Coaching strategy comes in.

What we’ll do is look for that basic feeling that’s preventing you from being able to manage your emotions and causes them to dominate you.

Strategic Nutrition Coaching gives you different options so you can overcome obstacles.

Step 3: Starting small

Many people who want to lose weight, want to lose it now!

And that’s NOT possible.

It’s like anything. Every objective takes time, will, patience and perseverance.

Therefore, one of the things I like the most about Strategic Brief Therapy is that it helps you take the “smallest” step to move towards your goal.

As Confucius said:

I am more in favor of changing habits little by little, than of dieting.

Nardone would say that “dieting makes you fat”.

And, you avoid the “yo-yo effect”, that is, you lose weight while you’re dieting but when you stop, you recover the lost weight in a few months or even double it.

Therefore, I advise you to change your eating habits

Step 4: Do something about it every day

The important thing is for you to do something (small) every day that brings you closer to your goal.

For example,

You could start eating vegetables twice a day (one raw portion and a boiled one) either as a starter or as a side.

Or, increase the number of times per week you eat vegetables. Until you incorporate them into your routine.

Once it’s become a habit, you can set other goals:

• Reducing your meat consumption
• Increasing your fish consumption
• Decreasing sweets
• Increasing water consumption
• Etc.

Doesn’t this sound simpler than dieting?

Because the important thing is to maintain your goal over time, in this case, it’d be about maintaining your weight loss over time.

And that, requires small continuous actions.

 

If you’re interested in using the Strategic Nutritional Coaching method, contact me by emailing me at info@miriamesquivel.com