Lifestyle Medicine
2010-2020 A Decade of Growth for Wellness Coaching
After years of building a foundation, health and wellness coaching has flourished in the last decade. At the beginning of this last decade the International Coach Federation was only fifteen years old and the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching hadn’t even been thought of yet. My book, Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change, had been on the…
Astonishing Non-compliance – Understanding Grief and Readiness for Change in the Health Challenged Client
Medical noncompliance is a vast and complex issue that results in widespread human suffering and immense healthcare costs. Of the 3.8 billion pharmaceutical prescriptions written each year (USA) it is estimated that more than 50% of them are taken incorrectly or not at all. Medical noncompliance also includes failure to do medical self-care, self-testing and attend follow up appointments with…
China Embraces Real Balance Wellness Coaching
Faced with the same lifestyle-based health crisis many other countries are experiencing, China has been searching for a way to help people truly succeed at lasting lifestyle change. Over half of the men in China smoke. The diabetes rate is now higher than the United States, with heart disease, COPD and other “lifestyle diseases” on the rise. Health information…
Delivering The Behavioral Side Of Lifestyle Medicine Through Wellness Coaching
“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”
Hippocrates 420 B.C – 370 B.C.
Healthcare providers have been prescribing lifestyle improvement for thousands of years. The evidence has been built from the observations of Hippocrates all the way…
Emotions, Feelings and Healthy Choices: Coaching for Greater Wellness
One of the first things we learn about in the fields of Wellness & Health Promotion and Health & Wellness Coaching, is that our lifestyle choices are a primary determinant of our health and wellbeing. It seems straightforward that making the right or healthy choice is a rational process based upon having the best information. We often then address…
Forging A New Wellness Path: Leaving Health Risk Reduction Behind
Attending Lifestyle Medicine 2013 (http://lifestylemedicine.org/lifestylemedicine2013) in the Washington, D.C. area this week I was heartened to be around so many enthusiastic people from the medical world who have embraced the realization of just how behavioral health is. The conference was “small but mighty” and had doubled in size since the previous year.
Dean Ornish (http://www.ornishspectrum.com…
Keys to Coaching Clients Who Overidentify With Their Illness
We like to say that a coach listens to a person’s story and helps them to realize that they are not their story.
For the health-challenged client, their illness, conditions, or health experience is a huge part of their story. “I am a diabetic.” While this is true, how strongly does the person now see themselves through this lens? What…
The Zone of Compassion: More Thoughts on the Heart of Coaching
How do we allow ourselves to enter the zone of compassion, and what holds us back from going there? How do we keep our “coherent sense of self” that Erik Erikson talked about intact when we connect with the ‘other’? (Allow me to use the term ‘other’ to refer to a person or persons, clients, or otherwise throughout this piece.).
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