Health Promotion
Maybe The Last Heart Attack
Each year over one million Americans experience a heart attack, about one every thirty seconds. CNN produced a program recently about this that has everyone talking: “Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: The Last Heart Attack.” (http://sanjayguptamd.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/29/sanjay-gupta-reports-the-last-heart-attack/) (watch the entire program while it’s archived here)
Following the odyssey of former President Bill Clinton and two…
Meaning And Purpose: A Key To Wellness
Those in the helping professions have long observed that people who have a sense of meaning and purpose appear to do better with their lives in general and their health in particular. Research over the last ten years is showing us that our observations were spot on. A clear, if even very simple, sense of one’s values, meaning and purpose…
New 2nd Edition Of Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change
In 2007 Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change became the first comprehensive health and wellness coaching book published. Written expressly for the practitioner, it quickly became the foundational book of the field and has remained so to this day. Updated in 2009 it has served as the go-to book for independent coaches, health care and wellness professionals, and is often…
Pre-diabetes – A Wellness Opportunity To Help
There is an opportunity for wellness and wellness coaching to impact the lives of millions of people in a life-saving way. 79 million Americans are estimated to have a condition called pre-diabetes. Usually symptom free, without intervention they will develop full-fledged Type II diabetes within ten years and possibly endure physical damage to their heart and circulatory system along the…
Productive Exploration In Wellness Coaching
How can we tell if we have or have not done enough exploration with a wellness coaching client? Inadequate exploration usually results in poorly selected and set goals. In the rush to do “goal-setting” clients sometimes do so without considering all aspects of their life, health and wellbeing first. Many times I have seen a client insightfully discover that a…
Real Balance GLOBAL – Taking Wellness Coaching To China
What The World Health Organization dubbed “Lifestyle Disease” is a global phenomenon. The increase of non-communicable disease is going up the fastest in what is sometimes called the developing countries of the world. “Twenty-five years ago, the number of people with diabetes in China was less than one percent. Today, China has more than 114 million people suffering from the…
Slimmest City in the Country = Fort Collins, Colorado
When the Fort Collins/Loveland, Colorado metro area topped the Gallup Poll research as being the least obese metro area in the United States, those of us who live here were proud, but not very surprised. It is evident that things are a bit different here…in a good way.
Gallup found that there are huge disparities across our nation when…
Social Distancing – Not Social Isolation: Coaching for Connectedness in the age of COVID-19
We all still need each other. Even in the age of COVID-19, our health continues to depend upon healthy supportive relationships. Real Balance https://realbalance.com has always stressed what we call Coaching for Connectedness. We‘ve seen lifestyle improvement occur and last more often when people receive support for the changes they are making to live healthier lives. When a…
Stress Coaching Part I: A False Sense Of Urgency
How often do you find yourself and others around you at work and at home operating on a false sense of urgency? How often do we take action before we have all the facts, or make a decision just to relieve our anxiety? See if this sounds familiar? On Thursday, a deadline is set for Friday for a report nobody…
Stress Coaching Part II – Recovery From Stress
What we refer to as “stress” is quite a mystery. Ill-defined by most everyone except psychological researchers, we ascribe devastating levels of power to it, and often feel helpless to cope with it. We know that stress is linked to worsening health, greater risk of illness and the exacerbation of most any condition we find ourselves with.
Wellness and…
The Bigger Mindset Shift: Waking Up To Lasting Lifestyle Improvement
Just back from a whirlwind of professional travel, I’m struck by a pervasive awakening that our health is largely behavioral, and if we truly want to improve health worldwide, we must seek methods that support success at lasting lifestyle improvement. At the Lifestyle Medicine 2015 Conference http://lifestylemedicine2015.org, where I presented, we saw that the medical profession is embracing wellness…
The Bonus Benefits Of Exercise
Harvard’s School of Public Health (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/staying-active-full-story/) is quick to tell of all the prevention advantages of exercise. We know that getting more movement and exercise into our lives can help prevent the onset of heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers, high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome and osteoporosis. Exercise can be vital to positively affect the course of these illnesses…
The Challenge of Being Well And Being Male
Living a healthy lifestyle presents challenges for everyone, but what are men, in particular, up against when it comes to being well? Stereotypes aside, let’s look at what we know about men’s health during Men's Health Week 2020.
In January 2012 a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, published in the Journal of the American Medical…
The Health And Wellness Coach’s Value Proposition
Every potential coaching client is looking to have the question ‘What’s in it for me?’ answered. Every coach needs to be able to succinctly answer that question by conveying what they will provide for their client.
Potential coaching clients are rarely familiar with what a coach, especially a health & wellness coach, can do for them. They are used…
The Optimistic Advantage in Being Well
Considering how happy most folks are to see 2011 fading in the rear-view mirror, it’s amazing what a collective sense of optimism there is about 2012. An Associated Press-GfK survey found that 62 percent of those surveyed are optimistic about what 2012 will bring America, and 78 percent were personally optimistic about the new year. (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70925.html) This validated…
The Road Ahead for Wellness Coaching: Trends To Look For
Returning from the 2013 National Wellness Conference this month, I continue to be amazed at how wellness coaching has become such a vital part of the wellness field. The tiny trickle of interest in wellness coaching that began in the late 1990’s is now practically a tsunami of both excitement and action washing the field forward with surprising speed.
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The What, the How and the Why of Lifestyle Improvement
Health and wellness folks are sometimes confused about the role each professional might play in helping individuals to live their best life possible. Our clients are seeking to be healthier by losing weight, managing stress, stopping smoking, becoming less isolated, and often, managing a health challenge of some kind. To do so they need:
- excellent wellness information
- …
Time Affluence: What New Findings Mean For The Wellness Coach
No matter how intensely we human beings think about time, the Earth rotates on its axis in the same twenty-four hour cycle. Yet time is all about our perception of it, and far too frequently we view it as a scarce commodity. Time scarcity thinking is just as detrimental to our health and wellbeing as financial scarcity thinking, maybe even…
Wellness Coach Certification: What It Means and the Top Six Features to Look for in a Wellness Coach Training Program
The field of wellness coaching is growing and more job opportunities are unfolding for people with the right training and expertise. More and more a qualification for those wellness and health coaching positions is a certification in wellness coaching. At the same time there is concern and confusion about just what a wellness coach certification is and means. Licensure, certification…
Wellness Coaching And Chronic Lung Disease
It surprises many people to discover that the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer, is chronic lower respiratory diseases. These conditions take twice as many lives annually as does diabetes. Yet, unless COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), or another such disease is part of your life or family, the seriousness…
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