If you are new to my site and social media, then you might not know that I have a history of heart problems that lead to me becoming an advocate for heart health. I now lead a life that I thought was gone forever, and I believe that with the accountability that a heart health coach provides…you can too. A good coach can help you be honest with yourself about your current health and wellness, step outside your comfort zone, and make healthy lifestyle changes that last.
What Is A Heart Health Coach?
A heart health coach is a trained and certified professional that uses conversational strategies and techniques to engage clients in behavior that improves their cardiovascular health. Being experts in habit change methods, human behavior, and motivation, heart health coaches empower their clients to dramatically improve their lives by making small lifestyle changes over time that lead to massive long-term success.
Why Heart Health Coaches?
With medical costs at a staggering all time high in this country, many health professionals are suggesting that their patients seek out alternative forms of care. Health coaching is high on that list as it helps treat the cause of health problems rather than the symptoms. A very high percentage of heart disease in this country is preventable, and heart health coaches provide the knowledge, accountability, and habit change methods that doctors simply do not have time to devote to their patients. This, combined with the fact that heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States, makes heart health coaching an obvious choice for battling this mostly preventable disease.
The 3 Tenets of Heart Health Coaching
When it comes to helping my clients repair or reverse the damage of cardiovascular disease or stopping it from developing in the first place, I follow what I call the 3 Tenets of Heart Health Coaching.
- Move Your Body Often
- Eat Clean, Not Mean
- Up-Level Heart Healthy Nutrients
Heart disease is a mostly preventable health problem. Moving your body, and getting a minimum of 30 minutes of elevated heart rate at least 5 days per week has been shown to dramatically improve heart health. Adults should be moving more and sitting less in this country, but we have grown to be a mostly sedentary society.
People who engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity at least 150 minutes per week live longer, have fewer health problems, and are sick less than people who sit more and lead sedentary lifestyles.
Eating a cleaner diet is linked to a lowered risk of developing heart disease, and in some cases can even help reverse heart disease. “Eat Clean” means that you remove as many chemicals and saturated and trans fats from your diet as you can. If your food comes in a box, bag, sack, wrapper, or can, you aren’t really eating food…mostly chemicals. Modern food is designed more for convenience than nutrition.
We would all be healthier if we ate like our great-great grandparents did, and eliminated all the chemicals and trans fats from out diets. The Eat Clean, Not Mean tenet focuses on gradually increasing the amount of dietary fiber, healthy (Omega 3) fats, and clean protein to your diet.
The final piece of the puzzle that I use to help my clients gain their health back is teaching them how to increase the amount of heart healthy nutrients like magnesium, omega 3’s, and vitamin D they get in their diets. Most people are vitamin deficient. It’s not your fault. The food we eat in the modern American diet is just not as nutritious as it used to be, so adding back the nutrients your body needs can have a major impact on your health.
How Heart Health Coaches Help You Make Lasting Lifestyle Changes
A good health and wellness coach has the ability to show you the possibilities of a healthier life through conversation. They can inspire and motivate you to follow through on your goals and dreams, and hold you accountable for doing so. Just wanting to make healthier choices is often not enough to make an impact on your life. Knowing and understanding that your life can change, and having someone in your corner all the while can make a big difference in the end picture.
Goal setting is a skill that most people know very little about, and is something that I think should be taught in grade school. Setting goals begins with understanding what your vision of future success looks like, and then developing a deep connection and motivation towards final success. This ensures that failure is not an option. Most people pick an arbitrary goal without deep diving into why they want to achieve it. By doing so, they leave a lot of opportunity for other areas of their life to interfere with reaching that goal. A wellness coach is trained in the ability to help you draw out your deepest desires, and form them into reachable goals.
Without follow through and accountability, goal setting is a waste of time. Accountability is the number one reason people fail to reach their desired end results. We think we can hold ourselves accountable, but it really is next to impossible to do so. Your friends and family are also not very good at holding you accountable. Your family don’t want to see you struggle, and friends have their own lives and problems to deal with. Having an unbiased and focused accountability partner will keep you on track and motivated to follow through on your plans. A heart health coach will not only give you the information on how to make amazing shifts in your health and wellness, but will also be there to make sure you are following through on the activities and tasks to get you there.
Goal setting and accountability are equally important in your quest to create a new healthy lifestyle for yourself. Without a roadmap for success, however, you may just be spinning your wheels in place. Having a health coach create a plan of action will keep your eyes on the end result. It’s is a true statement that, “The more help someone needs, the less change they can tolerate at once.” Each person is an individual with specific needs, and any health coach worth their salt can create a custom program that is specifically for you. You don’t need to get bogged down by the details of how you are getting there, just trust the process your coach has laid out.
The Heart Healthy Reboot
Several times per year I host a FREE Heart Healthy Reboot challenge. In this week long course, you will learn how to implement the 3 Tenets of Heart Health Coaching for yourself and get some eye opening material. And…it’s 100% FREE.
Participation for these events is limited to only a few, but if you would like to get insider access to the next Heart Healthy Reboot CLICK HERE to get on the waitlist!
If you don’t know where to start, I’m here for you. Each and every week I set aside times for what I call Success Strategy Sessions. These short (and FREE!) coaching calls are designed to get you moving toward your goals and reaching them at lightening speed. During the call we’ll talk about where you currently are, where you’d like to be, and come up with some quick actionable steps you can take right away.
These calls are FREE, but I only have a limited amount of time to do them each and every week. They are “first-come-first-serve”. Schedule a free Success Strategy Session today!
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