What is Health and Wellness Coaching? Dr Michael Arloski, Ph.D., PCC, CWP

July 16, 2012 | In Health, News

Wellness coaching is the application of the principles and processes of professional life coaching to the goals of lifestyle improvement for higher levels of wellness. Wellness coaches today work to help people get positive results in areas like weight loss, smoking cessation, medical compliance/adherence, stress reduction, time management and job performance.

Working as a professional ally, wellness and health coaches (the terms are basically interchangeable) can help people create a sustainable way of living, helping with the prevention of illness, a more positive outcome for the course of an illness, and with maximising general health and wellbeing.

A wellness coach will work with a person, helping them attain clarity regarding their current health and their motivation to live well. Coach and client then co-create an integrated wellness plan and set up the support and accountability the client needs to experience sustained success.

Many healthcare professionals such as dieticians, nutritional therapists, nurses, health educators, rehabilitation therapists, chiropractors, physicians, fitness trainers and others find that the skills of wellness coaching serve them extremely well within their professions when it comes to helping with the behavioural side of health.

Leo was a middle-aged man working as a police officer on an urban force. Like many of his colleagues the climb up the ranks meant a move to deskwork. Leo was about 27 kg overweight, borderline hypertensive (taking medication) and continuing to gain weight. He was medically cleared to engage in lifestyle improvement efforts while he remained under his physician’s care.

“I’m great at losing weight!” Leo exclaimed at our first meeting. “I’m just not good at keeping it off.” Leo wanted to be healthy and live a long active life that he could lovingly share with his wife and two children. We met in person at his office and then did most of our subsequent eleven sessions on the telephone.

We began our coaching by helping Leo take stock of his wellness and health status, explore his history of success and failure in weight loss efforts, look at his work circumstances, family situation, and anything else that would influence the dynamics of working on weight loss. Leo’s emotions around eating were not complicated, but more situational. He sometimes supplemented his income by providing security services at major sporting events and would come home ravenous. While on his feet for long hours during such jobs, most of his work world had become more like the typical office worker. The sedentary life was his biggest enemy.

Leo wanted to be healthy and appreciated my coaching efforts. Together we quickly crafted a wellness plan with new strategies for improving his eating, but especially around increasing his activity level. Working out extra hours at a fitness centre was unlikely, so we concentrated in our plan on creatively developing more and more ways to increase movement throughout the day. To help him be objective about this, Leo wore an activity-monitoring device that gave him feedback about all of this movement throughout the day. He combined this with meal planning and calorie counting using an app on his mobile phone, which made it easy. Leo’s training as a policeman actually helped him to be exceptional at tracking his behaviour.

The coaching relationship was a key part of Leo’s success. He felt continual support and a lack of judgment. We continually worked through barriers together with strategic thinking and made agreements each week as to what action steps he would take to bring him closer to his goals. Together, we came up with ideas to increase movement like walking around the athletic field when attending his children’s sporting events, always taking the stairs, standing at work as much as possible, and finally getting involved working in a conscious exercise program of strength training and aerobics.

As the weight came off it was very reinforcing for Leo. Success delivered more success and Leo came to see the process as more and more fun and less of a difficult ordeal.

21.7 kg of the 27 kg were lost. Leo reported having more energy, much greater ease of movement, more stamina and feeling like he finally has the confidence to maintain his weight loss this time. Two and a half years later he reports that he has completely succeeded at keeping every pound lost from coming back. He also reported that he recently went through a life-threatening health challenge that doctors found difficult to diagnose. He made a full recovery and his physicians have told him that his strong heart had made a life-saving difference. He attributes that cardiac strength to his increased activity and higher level of wellness that the coaching him helped him achieve.





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