Food Coaching, as a sub-category of health coaching, focuses on how to unlock an individual’s potential to perform healthy food choices in every stage of their life and mobilize them to move forward. Food Coaching is a practice that promotes an interdisciplinary, science-based methodology for a fundamental purpose: food selection and suitable food consumption for the prevention of diet-related diseases and the promotion of health and well-being. Food Coach Valentini Konstantinidou tells us more.
Food Coaching lies above health coaching and common dietary recommendations. It aims to help people acquire advanced knowledge about how food can affect their health and empowers them to perform, related-to-food, lifestyle changes that will reveal their optimal self.
A Food-focused Coaching practice is a special category in the field of coaching that targets long-term goals of well-being and health. Food Coaching practice focuses on food preferences, food selection, food preparation, and storage.
PROMOTION OF WELLBEING
The need for food coaching strives from the lack of adherence that people have been showing the last decades to their healthy dietary patterns recommendations. Food Coaching practice enhances and favorites the adherence to a healthy dietary pattern for the prevention of multifactorial diseases and the promotion of well-being.
Dietary patterns are a major environmental factor that people are exposed to numerous times a day throughout their lives. Diet is also an environmental factor that people can learn to control from early on to prevent diet-related diseases and conditions and promote healthy living and aging. Data from big, randomized, and controlled intervention trials (RCTs) have shown that adherence to dietary patterns could provide an excellent primary form of prevention from cardiovascular diseases.
Adherence to healthy dietary patterns and lifestyles are still a struggle for healthcare practitioners around the world, even with the advanced scientific guidelines in the field. Health professionals tend to notice that the lack of adherence could be the primary cause of illness in the case of chronic diseases.
WHOLE FOOD CONSUMPTION
Although natural, sustainable, whole food consumption is becoming the focus of preventive medicine and a fundamental way of treatment in numerous conditions and diseases, people do not always know how to find and choose their food.
In the information era where technological applications lead the health and well-being of the population, people are often confused and misled about the correct quality and quantity when it comes to the consumption of whole foods. Thus, they prefer to follow quick fix and easy methods they can find, mainly online, from unreliable sources. The majority of these methods lack precise scientific basis and education on food selection. Quality food allows the body to heal, repair, and become rebalanced at the molecular and genetic level but this knowledge does not always reach the final consumer.
ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS
Food coaching trains people to apply in their everyday life scientific and evidence-based knowledge about food benefits on their health. People who seek food coaching want to re-organize and re-think what food could be and how they can benefit from whole food consumption. The practice of food coaching facilitates knowledge, enhances behavioral change towards food choices, and eliminate any frustrations people may have on food consumption. Food coaches provide a level of support and work with the coachee to take it one-step at a time to achieve their goal. Food coaching sessions are mainly once a week but could also be once every two weeks depending on the coachee.
A food coach respects and prioritizes the values of the coachee when it comes to food choices. Nowadays, people are seeking for a more balanced option and a re-definition of what quality of life means. Values control our primary principles and serve as a strong motive for people to accomplish tasks or challenge situations. Our values influence our motivation. In food coaching it is pivotal to understand and control the facts behind the food behavior and to relate it to motivation. Intrinsic motivation is achieved when the goal is linked to personal values and a deeper will and need for achievement.
Valentini Konstantinidou, MSc, PhD