Guiding a client to intuitive eating is very tricky. Most of your clients come to you thinking they need to track calories forever. They’ve been told it’s the only way, and they’re resigned to a lifetime of logging every meal. Maybe you’ve reinforced that belief yourself. Maybe you’ve built your entire coaching practice around the certainty of macros, the precision of tracking, the satisfaction of hitting numbers. But here’s something I need you to sit with for a moment: the more we encourage clients to control their nutrition through constant tracking, the less true control they actually develop. Think about that. The tool that gives them the most precise data might be preventing them from building the most important skill we can teach.
This isn’t a comfortable realisation, especially if tracking has been your primary coaching methodology. I understand that. Tracking works. It produces results. It gives both you and your clients something tangible to hold onto in a process that can feel uncertain and chaotic. But working and lasting are not the same thing. A crutch works to help someone walk, but if you never remove it, you haven’t actually restored their ability to walk independently. You’ve just created permanent dependency on an external support.
What I want to explore with you today is how we can reframe our entire approach to nutrition coaching, shifting from teaching clients to track indefinitely to intentionally guiding them through the developmental stages from dependency to intuition. This isn’t about whether tracking works (it does). This isn’t about whether it’s useful (it is). This is about understanding tracking’s true purpose: it’s educational scaffolding, not the foundation of their nutritional system. And as coaches, our job is to build something that lasts long after they stop working with us.
TL;DR
Tracking calories and macros works, but it was never meant to be permanent. It’s educational scaffolding, not a lifestyle. The real goal of nutrition coaching is guiding clients through four developmental stages: from being unaware of their habits, to the uncomfortable realisation of what they’re actually eating, to competent tracking, and finally to intuitive eating, where good decisions become automatic. Most coaches make the mistake of keeping clients stuck in the tracking phase indefinitely because it’s working and measurable, but this creates dependency rather than capability.
The transition to intuition is messy, and clients will wobble, misjudge portions, and want to retreat to the safety of logging everything. Your job is to normalise that discomfort, gradually remove the scaffolding, and help them build evidence that they can navigate food decisions independently. Success isn’t a client who tracks perfectly forever; it’s someone who can walk into any restaurant, make reasonable choices without anxiety, and maintain their progress through life’s chaos. You’re not building compliant trackers, you’re developing practical wisdom that lasts decades.
Table of Contents
- 1 TL;DR
- 2 Reframing What Tracking Actually Does (And What It Doesn’t)
- 3 The Four Stages: Your Roadmap for Client Development
- 4 Navigating the Uncomfortable Middle Ground
- 5 Dismantling All-or-Nothing Thinking
- 6 Join 1,000+ Coaches
- 7 Coaching Through the Timeline: Expectations and Patience
- 8 Your Role as Coach: Facilitator of Phronesis
- 9 Common Coaching Mistakes That Keep Clients Stuck
- 10 The Long Game: What You’re Really Building
- 11 Practical Implementation: Your Coaching Roadmap
- 12 Guiding A Client to Intuitive Eating Final Thoughts
- 13 Author
Reframing What Tracking Actually Does (And What It Doesn’t)
Let’s start by getting clear on what we’re actually doing when we ask clients to track. At its core, tracking is a measuring tool. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s a method of gathering data, quantifying intake, and creating awareness. And in that capacity, it’s incredibly valuable. But somewhere along the way, in our industry’s obsession with precision and optimisation, we’ve confused the measurement tool with the skill itself. We’ve mistaken the map for the territory.
In educational psychology, there’s this concept called scaffolding, which are temporary support structures that help learners develop skills but are specifically designed to be removed once competence is achieved. That’s exactly what tracking should be in our coaching. It’s scaffolding for nutritional education. The goal was always to build the building, not to keep the scaffolding up forever. But if you look around our industry, you’ll see coaches who’ve built entire business models around permanent scaffolding, creating clients who believe they cannot function without constant external monitoring.
Think about how you learned to cook, if you did learn to cook beyond following recipes robotically. Early on, you measured everything precisely because you didn’t have the intuition to eyeball measurements. A recipe called for a quarter cup of oil, and you pulled out the measuring cup because you had no internal sense of what that volume looked like or how it would affect the dish. But after enough repetition, after cooking the same dish multiple times, after experimenting and adjusting and tasting, you developed a feel for it. You could glance at the pan and know roughly how much oil you’d poured. You could taste the sauce and know it needed more salt without measuring. That’s procedural learning in action. It’s the same mechanism that makes driving feel automatic after years of practice, the same process that lets a skilled musician play without consciously thinking about finger placement.
That’s ultimately what we’re trying to facilitate with our clients and their nutrition. We’re trying to help them develop procedural knowledge. The kind of embodied, intuitive understanding that doesn’t require conscious calculation. But where most coaches go wrong is that they never plan for this transition. They introduce tracking as “the way” rather than as “a temporary educational phase,” and then they keep clients there indefinitely because it’s working, because the clients are compliant, because moving beyond it feels risky and uncertain.
When clients track, they’re simply quantifying their nutrition. They’re gathering data and building awareness. They’re learning what 150 grams of chicken looks like on a plate, discovering that their “handful” of nuts is actually three servings, understanding energy density through direct experience rather than abstract knowledge. This information is invaluable, and I’m not dismissing it. But what we need to be clear about with ourselves and with them is that tracking was never meant to be their entire nutritional method for life. It was meant to be the training wheels that eventually come off.
When clients track, we’re creating an external feedback loop. They eat something, they log it in an app, they see data points and numbers, and they adjust their subsequent choices based on that external information. This works incredibly well, especially in the early stages. But it’s fundamentally external. The feedback comes from outside themselves; from an app, from a database of nutritional information, from our guidance as coaches. What we’re ideally building toward is an internal feedback loop, where they eat something, they notice how it makes them feel, they observe their energy and hunger patterns over the next few hours, they remember those embodied experiences, and they adjust their future choices based on internal wisdom rather than external data.
The internal loop is far more durable because it can’t be disrupted by a dead phone battery, a restaurant meal that’s not in the database, a holiday where they just don’t want to think about logging, or the inevitable life circumstances where tracking becomes impractical or impossible. The external loop is fragile; remove the scaffolding, and everything collapses. The internal loop is antifragile; it actually gets stronger through the variability and challenges of real life. Every novel situation becomes an opportunity to refine the internal calibration rather than a threat that might derail everything.
As coaches, we need to recognise that there are diminishing marginal returns to tracking. In economics, this principle states that each additional unit of input produces less and less additional output. Your client’s first week of tracking teaches them immense amounts. They’re shocked by portion sizes. They’re discovering hidden calories. They’re building awareness they never had. Month six of tracking? Still valuable, but each day logged is teaching far less than those early days did. Month twelve? The 365th day of tracking is teaching far less than the 30th day did. At some point, and this point is different for every client, continued tracking has minimal marginal benefit while maintaining significant cost in time, mental energy, and psychological dependency.
Part of our job as coaches is recognising when a client is past the point of optimal returns and needs to transition to the next stage of development. But this requires us to let go of our own attachment to tracking as the primary intervention. It requires us to trust that we can coach effectively without the crutch of macro management. It requires us to develop more sophisticated skills than simply reviewing food logs and adjusting numbers.
The ancient Greeks had a word for what we’re building, phronesis, which translates to practical wisdom. Aristotle understood that this kind of wisdom cannot be taught through rules alone. You can’t learn phronesis from a textbook or an app. It develops through lived experience, through making decisions in real situations with real consequences, through learning what actually works in the messy complexity of actual life rather than the clean simplicity of theoretical plans. Aristotle wrote that gaining this wisdom requires time and experience; it’s “the fruit of years.” It cannot be rushed. It cannot be downloaded. It must be earned through practice.
That’s what we’re cultivating in our clients when we coach well. We’re developing nutritional phronesis, the practical wisdom that lets them navigate meals, make reasonable choices, and maintain progress without measuring, weighing, and calculating. They develop an intuitive sense of appropriate portions. They learn to read their own hunger and satiety signals. They understand the relationships between what they eat and how they feel. They can make judgment calls in ambiguous situations. They can adapt to changing circumstances. They can recover from mistakes without spiralling. That’s phronesis in action, and it’s worth infinitely more than the ability to hit macros perfectly while tracking.
That should be our guiding star as coaches: not creating compliant trackers, but developing wise decision-makers. Not building dependency on our systems, but building capacity for independent navigation. Not teaching people to follow our rules forever, but giving them the tools to create their own sustainable approach based on self-knowledge and experience.
The Four Stages: Your Roadmap for Client Development
Understanding the Four Stages of Competence model gives us a clear developmental roadmap for guiding a client to intuitive eating. This framework, which has roots in psychology and education but has been applied across domains from martial arts to corporate training, maps the journey from complete unconsciousness about a skill to mastery where the skill becomes second nature. Let me walk you through each stage, what it looks like specifically in nutrition coaching, and most importantly, how to coach effectively at each stage so you’re facilitating genuine development rather than just managing compliance.
Stage One: Unconscious Incompetence
This is where most clients start, and it’s characterised by a lack of awareness about what they don’t know. They’re unaware of the gap between their current state and where they need to be. They might say “I eat pretty healthy” or “my portions are normal,” but they don’t have accurate data to support these beliefs. They’re confidently wrong about their intake, portion sizes, or caloric density, but they don’t know they’re wrong. There’s no malice here, no willful ignorance. They simply haven’t been given the tools to see clearly.
This connects to what psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with limited competence in a domain overestimate their ability because they lack the metacognitive awareness to recognise their own limitations. Your client who insists they barely eat anything but can’t lose weight, isn’t lying to you. They genuinely believe what they’re saying because they’ve never measured or quantified their intake. They don’t know what they don’t know, and that fundamental lack of awareness prevents them from making informed changes.
Common statements you’ll hear from clients in Stage One include: “I barely eat anything, but I still can’t lose weight.” “I only have one small handful of nuts as a snack.” “I don’t eat that much, honestly.” These statements often come with genuine confusion or frustration because, from their subjective experience, they really are eating what feels like small or reasonable amounts. They don’t yet understand that their internal calibration is off.
Your coaching role here is not to shame or correct harshly. Shame creates resistance and defensiveness, neither of which facilitate learning. Instead, your job is to create the conditions for awareness to emerge naturally. This is where we introduce tracking as an educational tool, but we frame it very carefully. We’re not saying “you’re wrong” or “you need to be controlled.” We’re saying, “let’s gather some data so we can see what’s actually happening.” We’re cultivating curiosity rather than imposing judgment.
Frame it explicitly as a learning phase from the very beginning: “For the next few weeks, we’re going to track everything, so you can build awareness of what these amounts actually look like. Think of this as a fact-finding mission. We’re collecting information that will help you make better decisions.” This framing matters enormously because it positions tracking as temporary and educational rather than permanent and punitive.
Clients in this stage often resist tracking because they don’t see the need. They don’t know what they don’t know, so they can’t understand why measurement would be valuable. Your job is to create enough curiosity and buy-in that they’re willing to enter Stage Two. Sometimes sharing population statistics helps: “Most people underestimate their intake by 30-50% according to research. This is because our perception of portions has become distorted. Let’s just see where you actually are.” You’re normalising the gap before they even discover it, which softens the blow when awareness hits.
Stage Two: Conscious Incompetence
This is typically the first week or two of tracking, and it’s often profoundly uncomfortable for clients. This is when they start logging food and suddenly realise, “Oh. I’ve been eating way more than I thought.” Or “That ‘healthy’ smoothie has 600 calories?” They’re now aware of the gap between where they are and where they want to be. The fog has lifted, and they can see the reality of their situation, but that clarity itself can feel overwhelming or even demoralising.
This stage is psychologically vulnerable. Clients are facing uncomfortable truths about their habits, and depending on how we handle it, they’ll either move forward with motivated determination or get stuck in shame and paralysis. The awareness that they’ve been unconsciously overeating, sometimes significantly, can trigger feelings of failure, stupidity, or hopelessness. “How did I not know this? How have I been so wrong for so long? No wonder I haven’t made progress.” These are the internal narratives running through their minds.
Common statements you’ll hear include: “I had no idea I was eating that much.” “This is depressing. I’m so far from where I need to be.” “I feel like I can’t eat anything now that I see the numbers.” Notice the emotional weight in these statements. There’s often shock, dismay, and sometimes anger at themselves or at the situation.
Your coaching role here requires careful psychological management. Clients are vulnerable. They’re facing uncomfortable truths about their habits, and how you respond will determine whether they move forward or shut down. Your job is to normalise the discomfort while celebrating the awareness: “This realisation is actually huge progress. You can’t change what you can’t see. Now you can see. That’s a massive step forward. Most people never get this far because they never build this awareness.”
Reframe incompetence as the necessary prerequisite for competence, not as a character flaw or a failure. “You have to go through this stage. You can’t skip it. Every single person who’s developed nutritional intuition went through this exact phase of uncomfortable awareness. I went through it. Your favourite fitness influencer went through it. It’s part of the process, not a sign that something’s wrong with you.” This normalisation is critical because it prevents shame from calcifying into identity. They’re not a failure. They’re just at the beginning of a learning process.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught about the dichotomy of control. We don’t control what happened in the past, only how we respond to it now. This is the perfect time to introduce that concept to clients. “You weren’t doing anything wrong before. You were just working with the information you had. Now you have better information. What do you want to do with it?” This shifts the focus from backwards-looking regret to forward-looking agency. It’s empowering rather than demoralising.
The critical coaching mistake to avoid here is letting clients stay stuck in shame. Shame creates paralysis. It triggers the threat response in the brain, which actually impairs executive function and makes behavioural change harder. Awareness without shame creates possibility. It opens the door to curiosity and experimentation. Your language matters enormously in determining which path the client takes. Avoid any tone of “I told you so” or “see, you were wrong.” Instead, adopt a tone of “isn’t this interesting? Now we have real data to work with.”
This is also where you want to start connecting the data to their goals in a concrete way. “You wanted to lose 15 pounds, and you’ve been frustrated that nothing was working. Now we can see why. You thought you were eating 1800 calories, but you were actually closer to 2500. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just information. And now that we have it, we can make a plan that will actually work.” You’re turning the uncomfortable awareness into actionable opportunity.
Stage Three: Conscious Competence
This is the active tracking phase, where most clients will spend several months or even longer. They can now manage their nutrition effectively, hitting their targets consistently, making progress toward their goals. But it requires deliberate effort and concentration. They’re weighing food, logging meals, calculating totals, checking their remaining macros before deciding what to eat. They’re doing it well, but it takes mental energy. It’s not automatic or effortless. If they get distracted, go on holidays, or stop tracking for any reason, things slip. The competence is real but fragile because it’s still externally dependent.
This stage is characterised by active learning and pattern encoding. Every day of tracking is building neural pathways. They’re learning the relationships between foods and fullness. They’re discovering which meals keep them satisfied and which leave them hungry an hour later. They’re understanding how protein affects satiety differently than carbs or fats. They’re building a mental database of portion sizes and nutritional profiles. This is valuable work. This is where procedural learning begins to take root. But it’s still conscious and effortful.
Common statements from clients in Stage Three include: “It’s working, but it’s exhausting.” “I’m doing well as long as I track, but I’m worried about what happens when I stop.” “This feels unsustainable long-term, but I don’t know how to manage without it.” Notice the underlying anxiety in these statements. They’re succeeding, which is good, but they’re also aware that their success feels precarious, dependent on continued tracking effort.
Your coaching role here is twofold, and this is where most coaches stop. They see the client succeeding in Stage Three, and they think, “Great, this is working, let’s keep doing this.” But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what we’re trying to build. Your job here has two parts.
First, help them succeed in this stage. They’re building neural pathways, encoding patterns, and learning relationships between foods and fullness that will serve them later. Celebrate their consistency. Provide support when tracking feels hard. Help them troubleshoot challenges like eating out or travelling. Acknowledge the effort they’re putting in. This stage deserves recognition because the work is real and valuable.
But second, from day one of Stage Three, you should be preparing them for Stage Four. This cannot be an afterthought. This cannot be something you address only when they’re “ready to stop tracking.” It needs to be woven into your coaching from the very beginning. Plant seeds constantly: “Notice what this portion size looks like on your plate. You’re not going to track forever, so you need to learn to recognise this visually.” Or: “Pay attention to how you feel two hours after this meal. Are you satisfied? Still hungry? That’s data you’re gathering for when you’re not tracking anymore.”
Usually, around month three to six (and this timeline varies significantly by client), I start introducing what I call “intuition days” where they eat without tracking but then retroactively log to compare their intuition to reality. This creates powerful feedback. “You thought that meal was 600 calories. It was 800. But you were close! You were in the right ballpark. Let’s talk about what you learned from that experience. What would you adjust next time?” Over time, their intuitive estimates get better and better. The gap between their intuitive guess and the tracked reality shrinks. They become better calibrated, and the logging becomes less necessary because the internal feedback loop is developing.
Monitor for diminishing returns. When a client has been tracking consistently for months, and their learning has plateaued, when they can estimate portions quite accurately, when they understand their hunger patterns and know which foods work for them, that’s your signal to start actively transitioning them to Stage Four. Don’t keep them in Stage Three longer than necessary out of your own fear or need for control. Remember, we’re building toward independence, not permanent dependency.
This is also where you want to introduce the concept of antifragility from Nassim Taleb. A system that only works under perfect conditions is fragile. Any disruption breaks it entirely. But a system that gets stronger from disorder and stress is antifragile. Right now, their nutrition management is fragile because it depends entirely on tracking. Any situation where tracking becomes difficult threatens to derail everything. What we’re building toward is antifragility, where those challenging situations actually make them more capable because they’re learning to navigate without external support. This framing helps clients understand why we’re not trying to perfect their tracking forever. We’re trying to build something more robust.
Stage Four: Unconscious Competence
This is nutritional intuition, and it’s what every client should be working toward, even if not every client reaches it fully. The skill has become second nature. They can look at a plate and have a reasonable sense of whether it aligns with their goals without calculating anything. They’re tuned into hunger and fullness cues that were drowned out during the tracking phase. They make confident choices at restaurants without looking anything up. They navigate social situations without anxiety. They handle stress and travel without everything falling apart. The intense concentration of Stage Three would actually hinder them now because it would pull them out of the intuitive flow state they’ve developed.
This is where phronesis lives. They’ve developed practical wisdom through accumulated experience. They know what works for their body. They can read situations and make judgment calls. They can adapt to changing circumstances. They’ve internalised the principles and can apply them flexibly rather than following rigid rules. The knowledge has moved from explicit and conscious to implicit and embodied. It’s the difference between thinking about every step when you walk versus walking automatically while having a conversation.
Common statements from clients in Stage Four include: “I just kind of knew what to eat. I didn’t have to think about it.” “I stopped eating when I was satisfied, even though food was left on the plate.” “I made a good choice at the restaurant without looking anything up or feeling stressed about it.” Notice the ease in these statements. There’s confidence without anxiety. There’s competence without effort.
Your coaching role here is to build confidence and reinforce the internal feedback loop that’s now operating. When clients report successful intuitive decisions, celebrate them specifically: “Do you see what you just did? You read the situation, made a judgment call based on your experience, and trusted yourself. That’s exactly the skill we’ve been building for months. That’s phronesis in action. That’s practical wisdom.” Make the invisible visible by naming what they’re doing so they can recognise and value it.
Clients often doubt themselves in this stage, and your role is to address that doubt head-on. They feel like they “should” still be tracking for certainty. They worry that trusting their intuition is somehow being less disciplined or less committed. They might feel guilty for not logging everything. Your role is to reframe this completely: “The fact that this feels easier doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’ve developed competence. The skill has become internalised. This is exactly where we wanted to get. You’re not being undisciplined; you’re being self-regulated, which is actually a higher form of discipline.”
Help them understand that they’ve moved from external regulation to internal regulation, which is developmentally more advanced. Children need external rules and monitoring. Adults can self-regulate based on internalised values and goals. What you’ve helped them achieve is nutritional adulthood. They don’t need someone else to tell them what to eat or when to stop. They’ve developed their own internal guidance system based on experience and self-knowledge.
This is also where you introduce the Aristotelian concept of virtue more explicitly. Aristotle argued that virtue (whether courage, temperance, or practical wisdom) isn’t innate. It’s developed through practice in progressively challenging situations. You don’t become courageous by reading about courage. You become courageous by facing appropriately scaled threats and learning that you can handle them. They’ve become temperate with food not by following rules forever but by practising in real situations and building genuine capacity for self-regulation.
Now, we do need to talk about what I call the uncomfortable middle ground, which is the transition zone between Stage Three and Stage Four. This is a particularly tricky place when guiding a client to intuitive eating, and it is where many clients, and frankly many coaches, panic and retreat back to rigid tracking. Understanding this phase is crucial for effective coaching because it’s where most developmental journeys either succeed or fail. It’s the wobble phase, the awkward adolescence of nutritional development, and it requires more sophisticated coaching than any other stage.
This phase is characterised by clients trying to rely less on tracking while their intuition isn’t fully developed yet. They’re wobbling. Some days feel good and confident. Other days feel chaotic and uncertain. They’re not sure if they’re eating too much or too little without the numbers to confirm. This ambiguity triggers anxiety for many clients because they’ve become dependent on the certainty that tracking provides. And it triggers anxiety for many coaches who’ve built their entire practice around the concrete, measurable, controllable nature of macro management.
Your client might say things like: “I don’t know if I’m eating too much or too little without seeing the numbers.” “I felt good about my choices today, but I’m not sure if I actually stayed on track.” “Part of me wants to check by logging it, but I’m trying to trust myself.” This uncertainty is uncomfortable. It feels like regression. Both you and the client might be tempted to interpret it as failure and return to the safety of full-time tracking. Resist this urge. This discomfort is not a sign that something’s wrong. It’s a sign that learning is happening.
Think about a child learning to ride a bike. When the training wheels first come off, they wobble. They’re uncertain. They might fall. But falling isn’t failure; it’s part of learning to balance. If we put the training wheels back on at the first wobble, they never learn to ride independently. They stay dependent on external support. The same principle applies here. The wobbles aren’t failure. They’re the necessary process of developing internal calibration.
Your coaching role here matters more than at any other stage because this is where your skill as a facilitator of development shows up. Clients need three things from you during this phase.
First, normalisation. They need to hear that this awkward phase is not only normal but necessary. “This discomfort you’re feeling? Every person who develops intuitive eating goes through this. Every single one. You’re not doing it wrong. You’re not failing. You’re right on track. This is what the middle looks like, and it’s temporary.” This reassurance prevents them from interpreting normal developmental wobbles as personal failure.
Second, they need a strategic approach to scaffolding removal. Don’t go from 100% tracking to 0% tracking overnight. That’s setting them up to fail. Instead, create a gradual transition that builds confidence through small wins. Start with one intuitive day per week while tracking the other six. Or start with one intuitive meal per day. Let them experience success in manageable doses. Then progressively increase the intuitive portions: track six days, intuitive one day. Then track five days, intuitive two days. Then track four days, intuitive three days. Continue this progression based on their confidence and accuracy, not based on a predetermined timeline.
This gradual approach accomplishes multiple things. It prevents the all-or-nothing thinking that plagues many clients. It allows them to build evidence that they can do this. It gives you data about their intuitive accuracy that helps you calibrate the pace of transition. And it maintains a safety net while they’re learning. They know that even if they mess up on intuitive days, they’re still tracking most of the time, so they can’t derail their entire progress. This reduces anxiety and allows them to experiment more freely.
Third, they need evidence, and this is where portfolio building really comes in handy. This is crucial and often overlooked. After each intuitive eating experience, whether it’s a meal, a day, or a weekend, debrief with them. “What did you notice? How did that choice work out? What did you learn?” You’re helping them build a portfolio of evidence that they can do this. Each successful navigation becomes proof that the space between perfect tracking and chaos is real and navigable.
Have them literally document these experiences. “Tuesday dinner: ate out at an Italian restaurant, made a reasonable choice without tracking, felt satisfied after, energy was good the next day, weight stable.” “Weekend: didn’t track anything, stayed active and aware of hunger/fullness, made mostly good choices with one indulgent meal, maintained progress.” “Work event: navigated buffet successfully, stopped when satisfied even though food was available, didn’t feel deprived.” These aren’t just anecdotes. They’re case studies proving to the client that they have the capability they doubted.
Review this portfolio regularly in your coaching. When they express doubt or want to retreat to full tracking, pull out this evidence. “Look at what you’ve already done. You’ve successfully navigated seven different challenging situations without tracking. You’ve proven to yourself that you can do this. One wobble doesn’t erase all this evidence.” The subconscious shift from “I can’t do this without tracking” to “I’ve already done this multiple times” happens through accumulated evidence, not through one dramatic moment of confidence.
Now, they are going to mess up. They’re going to overeat sometimes. They’re going to misjudge portions. They’re going to make choices that don’t align with their goals. This is not failure. This is learning. When they overeat intuitively or feel like they failed, resist the urge to send them back to strict tracking. That response teaches them that they can’t be trusted, that they’re not capable, that their intuition is unreliable. Instead, treat mistakes as data.
“Okay, so what happened? Walk me through the situation. What were you thinking at the time? How did you feel after? What did you notice? What would you do differently next time?” This is pattern recognition in action. They’re learning to read the game, and you can’t learn to read the game without playing it. You can’t develop judgment without making judgments, some of which will be wrong. The mistakes are part of the curriculum, not interruptions to it.
This connects to Robert Bjork’s concept of desirable difficulty. Learning that feels easy often isn’t sticky. The struggle itself, when appropriately calibrated, is what creates durable learning. The wobbles during the transition aren’t obstacles to learning—they are the learning. Each mistake that they reflect on, learn from, and adjust for is building their practical wisdom in a way that perfect execution never could.
Dismantling All-or-Nothing Thinking
If there’s one psychological barrier that will sabotage this entire developmental journey, it’s all-or-nothing thinking. Your clients will bring this mindset to the coaching relationship. They’ve been marinating in diet culture their entire lives, and diet culture is built on binaries: on plan or off plan, good foods or bad foods, success or failure, tracking perfectly or eating chaotically. “I’m either tracking everything perfectly or everything falls apart.” This cognitive distortion is so pervasive that many clients don’t even recognise it as a distortion. They think it’s just reality.
Your job as a coach is to systematically dismantle this false dichotomy. You can’t do this through reassurance, “it’s okay to be imperfect!”, as it doesn’t actually address the underlying belief structure. You need to address it directly through multiple approaches.
Start with the Stoic dichotomy of control. Help clients understand what they actually can and cannot control. They cannot control outcomes with perfect precision. Bodies aren’t machines. They cannot control that hunger fluctuates based on sleep, stress, hormones, and a dozen other variables. They cannot control that stress affects appetite in unpredictable ways. They cannot control that social contexts create different pressures around food. Rigid tracking creates an illusion of control (“if I log perfectly, I’ll get exactly the results I want”), but it’s an illusion. The relationship between input and output in human biology is not linear or perfectly predictable.
But they can control their effort, their attention, their willingness to learn, and their approach to challenges. Redirect their focus there. Success isn’t perfect execution. Success is consistent effort in the right direction. Success is paying attention. Success is learning from experience. Success is showing up even when it’s hard. These are the controllable factors, and these are what actually determine long-term outcomes.
Help clients recognise that wisdom isn’t just knowing what to do, it’s knowing what not to do. As they build intuition, they’re learning negative rules that are based on self-knowledge: “Don’t go back for seconds or thirds when I’m already satisfied.” “Don’t eat just because it’s ‘mealtime’ if I’m genuinely not hungry.” “Don’t keep trigger foods accessible in my kitchen if I can’t moderate them yet.” These via negativa principles, to borrow from Nassim Taleb, are often more powerful than positive prescriptions.
In Taleb’s framework, via negativa means you often learn more from what to avoid than from what to do. Helping clients identify their personal via negativa rules, based on their own experience and self-knowledge, is more valuable than handing them generic rules about what to eat. “I’ve learned that if I go to that restaurant, I always overeat, so I’m choosing not to go there right now” is practical wisdom. “I’ve noticed that when I eat in front of the TV, I tune out my fullness signals, so I’m eating at the table instead” is self-knowledge applied. These are sophisticated self-management strategies that can only emerge from experience, not from a macro plan.
Explain antifragility in the context of their nutrition approach. A rigid tracking system is fragile, as any disruption breaks it entirely. Holidays? Can’t track, everything falls apart. Stressful week at work? No time to weigh food, chaos ensues. Phone dies? Can’t log meals, lose control. But nutritional intuition is antifragile; it gets stronger from disorder. Every challenging situation (dinner parties, holidays, stressful weeks, travel, celebrations) makes them more capable, not less, because they’re building real adaptive capacity. They’re learning to navigate uncertainty rather than requiring perfect conditions to function.
This mindset shift is profound because it reframes challenges from threats into opportunities. Instead of “oh no, I have a work dinner and won’t be able to track, this is going to derail me,” they think, “this is an opportunity to practice intuitive navigation and build my skill.” The situation hasn’t changed. Their relationship to it has.
Create a practice where clients document every successful intuitive eating experience, as I mentioned earlier. These become proof points that the middle ground between perfect tracking and complete chaos is real and navigable. All-or-nothing thinking thrives in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Build the evidence, systematically and consistently, and the cognitive distortion starts to dissolve.
Teach clients to become their own choice architects. Behavioural economists like Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have shown that structuring choices influences decisions without restricting freedom. This is the principle behind choice architecture; you’re not removing options, you’re designing the decision environment to make good choices easier. Coach clients to implement choice architecture in their own lives: keep protein-rich snacks visible and convenient, don’t stock trigger foods during the learning phase, plan ahead for challenging situations by thinking through likely scenarios, and structure their environment to make good choices the path of least resistance.
This is sophisticated self-management that emerges from self-knowledge, something tracking alone never teaches. When they’re tracking, they’re following external rules. When they’re architecting their choices, they’re designing their own system based on what they’ve learned about themselves. That’s a fundamentally different level of autonomy and capability.
All of these approaches work together to dismantle all-or-nothing thinking. You’re not just telling them “there’s a middle ground.” You’re proving it exists through evidence, explaining why it’s more robust through philosophical frameworks, and teaching them practical tools to navigate it. That’s how belief structures actually change, not through one conversation, but through accumulated experience and multiple supporting frameworks that reinforce each other.
Coaching Through the Timeline: Expectations and Patience
Aristotle wasn’t wrong when he said practical wisdom is “the fruit of years.” Your clients won’t move from Stage Two to Stage Four in weeks, and you need to set that expectation from the beginning. There’s no hack here. There’s no shortcut. There’s just the developmental process, which takes as long as it takes. Trying to rush it usually backfires because you’re asking clients to operate at a level of competence they haven’t yet developed. It’s like asking a white belt to roll like a purple belt; they don’t have the pattern recognition and embodied knowledge yet. They will in time, but not now.
Here’s a realistic timeline for most clients, understanding that individual variation is significant and some will move faster or slower based on multiple factors including learning style, previous experience, psychological factors, and life circumstances.
Stage One to Stage Two typically takes one to two weeks of tracking. This is the awareness-building phase. They start logging food and quickly realise their perception was inaccurate. The gap between what they thought they were eating and what they’re actually eating becomes visible. This phase is usually quick because the data is stark and undeniable.
Stage Two to Stage Three takes one to two months. This is the phase of developing consistent competence with tracking itself. Early on, tracking is difficult. It’s tedious. They forget to log meals. They don’t know how to estimate portions. They find the process overwhelming. But after a few weeks of practice, tracking itself becomes routine. They develop a rhythm. They know how to use the app efficiently. They’ve built a library of frequent foods. The mechanics of tracking become easier, which allows them to focus on the actual learning—the relationships between foods and outcomes.
Stage Three, the conscious competence phase where they’re actively tracking and learning, is where most clients need four to twelve months. This is the longest phase, and for good reason. They’re encoding patterns, building neural pathways, learning their body’s signals, and understanding nutritional relationships. This isn’t abstract knowledge. This is embodied, procedural learning that requires repetition and experience. You can’t shortcut this any more than you can shortcut learning a language or an instrument. The hours have to be put in.
The transition from Stage Three to Stage Four typically takes two to four months of gradual scaffolding removal. This is where you’re progressively reducing tracking days, building the evidence portfolio, and supporting them through wobbles. It’s not a light switch that flips overnight. It’s a gradual handoff of responsibility from external systems to internal wisdom.
Stage Four mastery is ongoing development. Clients typically feel confident and competent around the twelve to eighteen month total mark, but understanding that phronesis continues to deepen with years of experience. They’re functionally independent much earlier, but the wisdom continues to grow. They get better at reading their body. They navigate challenges more smoothly. They develop more sophisticated strategies. This is a lifelong journey, not a destination you arrive at and stop.
These are averages. I’ve had clients who moved faster because they had prior experience with tracking, high self-awareness, good emotional regulation, and strong motivation. I’ve had clients who needed more time because they were healing their relationship with food, working through psychological barriers, dealing with eating disorder history, or managing chaotic life circumstances. Resist the pressure to rush clients through these stages because your business model requires quick transformations or because you’re impatient with the process.
When clients get frustrated with the timeline (and they will), remind them what they’re actually building. “You’re building a skill that will serve you for the rest of your life. Think about that. Not for the next twelve weeks. Not for the duration of our coaching package. For the rest of your life. Would you expect to become fluent in a language in three months? To master an instrument in six months? This is the same type of learning. It’s developmental, and it takes as long as it takes. But unlike a crash diet that you white-knuckle through for eight weeks and then can’t sustain, this actually lasts. This is the last nutrition approach you’ll ever need to learn because it’s not an approach; it’s a capability.”
Help them understand that they’re in a structured progression with a clear path forward. The Four Stages model is useful here because it shows them where they are, where they’re going, and what comes next. Knowing they’re in Stage Three and heading toward Stage Four helps them stay patient with the process. Knowing that the wobbles in the transition phase are normal and temporary helps them persist through discomfort. The framework itself provides reassurance that there is a path through this, not just vague hopes that things will somehow get easier.
The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition actually suggests five stages rather than four, with “Expert” as the final level, where someone not only performs intuitively but can also teach others and innovate within the domain. Some of your clients will reach that level. They’ll become the person their friends come to for nutrition advice. They’ll understand the principles so deeply that they can adapt them to novel situations you never discussed. Most clients just need to reach solid Stage Four competence; intuitive, confident, and self-regulated. But understanding that there’s even further development possible can be motivating for some.
Your Role as Coach: Facilitator of Phronesis
Now, let’s briefly talk about your identity as a coach in this framework, because it requires a fundamental shift from how most coaches think about their role. You’re not a macro calculator. You’re not a meal plan generator. You’re not a compliance monitor. You’re a facilitator of practical wisdom; a facilitator of phronesis. That’s a fundamentally different role that requires different skills, different thinking, and different measures of success.
What this means practically is that you’re teaching principles, not prescribing rules. You’re helping clients understand the underlying principles of energy balance, nutrient timing, protein intake, satiety, energy density, etc., so they can make their own informed decisions based on principles they understand. When they understand why protein is satiating, they can choose high-protein foods in situations you never discussed. When they understand energy density, they can navigate any restaurant menu.
Principles are portable and generalisable. Rules are specific and dependent.
To do this well, you will generally be asking questions more than giving answers. “What did you notice about that meal?” “How did you feel two hours later?” “What would you do differently next time?” “What did you learn from that experience?” These questions build metacognition, which is the ability to think about one’s own thinking. You’re not telling them what to think. You’re teaching them how to learn from their own experience. That’s a dramatically higher-leverage intervention because it builds capacity rather than compliance.
You’re celebrating process victories, not just outcome metrics. Traditional coaching celebrates weight lost, body measurements changed, and macros hit perfectly. In this framework, success looks like: “You recognised you were satisfied and stopped eating even though food remained; that’s huge skill development.” “You navigated that dinner party confidently without tracking; that’s the practical wisdom we’re building.” “You had a rough eating day and didn’t spiral into shame; that’s emotional regulation and resilience.” These process victories are the leading indicators of long-term success, and they deserve recognition.
You’re creating learning experiences, not compliance systems. Instead of “here’s what to eat, now do it,” you’re designing experiments: “Try eating different protein amounts at breakfast this week and notice how it affects your hunger at lunch. Report back what you discover.” You’re positioning them as the researcher in their own life, gathering data about what works for their unique body and circumstances. This fundamentally changes the power dynamic from expert-student to guide-explorer.
There’s also a paradox of expertise that you need to understand as you become more skilled at this coaching approach. As you become more expert, your own knowledge becomes increasingly unconscious. You might make coaching decisions intuitively that you can’t fully articulate. You might sense that a client needs a different type of scaffolding without being able to explain exactly why. That’s okay, that’s phronesis at work in your own practice. But do the work to bring some of that tacit knowledge back to conscious awareness so you can teach it, because your clients need you to articulate what you’re seeing and why you’re making the coaching decisions you’re making.
Your success metrics will also need to shift entirely. Traditional coaching measures success by weight lost, macros hit, and tracking compliance. In this framework, success looks like growing client confidence, increasing self-trust, successful intuitive navigation of challenging situations, reduced food anxiety, and sustainable long-term behaviour without external monitoring. These are harder to measure than numbers on a scale or in a food log, but they’re infinitely more valuable. A client who loses fifteen pounds while tracking perfectly and then regains it when life gets chaotic hasn’t achieved sustainable success. A client who loses ten pounds more slowly while building genuine capability and maintains it through stress, travel, and life changes has achieved something meaningful and lasting.
Remember that your goal is to build antifragile clients who get stronger from challenges, not fragile clients who need you to solve every problem. Every time a client navigates a difficult situation successfully without you, celebrate that as your coaching success. Every time they apply a principle you taught to a situation you never discussed, that’s evidence that real learning happened. Every time they recover from a mistake without spiralling, that’s resilience you helped build. You’re working yourself out of a job in the best possible way, as you’re creating genuine independence rather than permanent dependency.
This is harder work than managing macros. It requires more psychological skill, more patience, more tolerance for uncertainty, and more trust in developmental processes. It’s easier to keep everyone in Stage Three tracking perfectly, hitting their numbers, staying dependent on your meal plans and macro adjustments. But that’s not real coaching; that’s management. And it doesn’t build anything that lasts beyond your direct supervision.
Common Coaching Mistakes That Keep Clients Stuck
There are a number of mistakes I see coaches make repeatedly that prevent clients from progressing through the stages. I’ve made most of these myself, so I’m speaking from experience here, not judgment. Understanding these pitfalls can help you avoid them and become more effective.
The first and biggest mistake is keeping clients in Stage Three indefinitely. You keep them tracking because it’s working. The numbers are good. They’re hitting their macros. They’re losing weight or building muscle or whatever the goal is. So you think “why change what’s working?” But Stage Three was never meant to be permanent. It’s a learning phase, not a lifestyle. If a client has been tracking consistently for nine to twelve months and you haven’t started actively transitioning them to Stage Four, you’re failing them. You’re prioritising your comfort and your business model over their long-term development. I know that’s harsh, but it needs to be said. We’re supposed to be building capability, not dependency.
The second mistake is not preparing clients for Stage Four from day one. If you only talk about intuitive eating when clients are “ready,” it will feel like a dramatic shift, and maybe even a scary one. They’ve spent months thinking tracking is “the way”, and now suddenly you’re saying they should stop? That’s confusing and anxiety-provoking. Instead, from day one, seed the expectation: “Remember, tracking is temporary. We’re using this to teach you to eventually do this without an app. Pay attention to what you’re learning, the portion sizes, how foods make you feel, your hunger patterns, because you’re gathering data for later when you won’t need to track anymore.” This makes the transition feel natural and expected rather than sudden and destabilising.
The third mistake is responding to setbacks by returning to strict tracking. When clients stumble during the uncomfortable middle ground between rigid tracking and full intuition, many coaches panic and send them back to tracking every day. “Okay, you struggled this week without tracking, so let’s go back to logging everything until you get back on track.” This teaches clients that they can’t be trusted. It teaches them that they’re not capable. It reinforces their doubt about their own intuition. Instead, treat stumbles as data, not as failure. “Okay, so what happened? What did you notice? What would you do differently next time? What did you learn from that experience?” Keep moving forward through the wobbles rather than retreating to the safety of external control every time things get hard.
The fourth mistake is not celebrating non-scale process victories. If you only celebrate weight loss or body composition changes, clients learn that outcomes matter more than skill development. They learn that the number on the scale is the only thing that counts. But that’s short-term thinking. Instead, celebrate the process: “You stopped eating when you were satisfied even though food remained on your plate; that’s incredible skill and self-regulation.” “You navigated that dinner party confidently without tracking anything; that’s the practical wisdom we’re building.” “You had a rough eating day, and you didn’t shame spiral or give up; that’s emotional resilience.” These victories predict long-term success far better than the scale does, and they deserve recognition.
The fifth mistake is failing to address all-or-nothing thinking directly. Many coaches try to fix this through reassurance: “It’s okay to be imperfect!” “You don’t have to be perfect!” But reassurance doesn’t actually address the underlying cognitive distortion. You need to actively dismantle all-or-nothing thinking through evidence-building (documenting successful middle-ground experiences), philosophical reframing (Stoicism, via negativa, antifragility), and creating experiences that prove the middle ground exists and is navigable. This is deeper work than reassurance, but it’s what actually changes belief structures.
The sixth mistake is not adjusting your coaching style to the client’s stage. Your coaching needs to look different at each stage because clients need different things at each stage. Stage Two clients need normalisation and encouragement. They’re vulnerable, facing uncomfortable truths, and they need you to help them see this as progress rather than failure. Stage Three clients need accountability and pattern recognition. They’re building the skill, and they need help staying consistent and noticing what they’re learning. Stage Four clients need confidence-building and autonomy support. They’re developing independence, and they need you to reflect back their capability and challenge their doubt. If you’re coaching everyone the same way regardless of stage, you’re being ineffective. The same intervention that helps a Stage Two client can hinder a Stage Four client.
A seventh mistake worth mentioning is creating a coaching business model that depends on permanent client dependency. If your entire revenue model requires clients to stay with you forever doing macro coaching, you’ve created a conflict of interest. You have a financial incentive to keep them dependent rather than help them develop genuine independence. I’m not saying you can’t have long-term clients, and maintenance coaching can be extremely valuable. But if clients can never graduate, if there’s no pathway to self-sufficiency, if you’re threatened by the idea of clients leaving because they no longer need you, that’s a problem. The best coaches have alumni, not permanent patients.
The Long Game: What You’re Really Building
Let’s zoom out and remember what we’re actually doing here, because it’s easy to get lost in the details of macros and meal timing and forget the bigger picture. We’re not just helping clients lose weight or build muscle or improve their blood markers, though those outcomes are valuable. We’re facilitating the development of practical wisdom that will serve them for decades. We’re building people who can navigate any food environment with confidence, make reasonable decisions under uncertainty, adapt to changing life circumstances, trust their own judgment, live without constant external regulation, handle social situations without anxiety, recover from mistakes without spiralling, and pass these skills to their own children.
That’s the legacy of coaching done well. That’s what happens when you guide clients intentionally through all four stages rather than keeping them dependent on tracking forever. You’re changing not just their body but their relationship with food, their relationship with themselves, their capacity for self-regulation, their resilience in the face of challenge.
Your best success stories won’t be “client lost 50 pounds and tracks everything perfectly.” They’ll be stories like: “Client went on holidays for two weeks, didn’t track anything, made reasonable choices, enjoyed the experience without anxiety, and came back having maintained their progress.” Or: “Client navigated a stressful period at work without tracking, made good-enough decisions under difficult circumstances, and didn’t spiral or lose the progress they’d built.” Or: “Client’s teenage daughter asked for help with nutrition, and the client was able to teach her principles and intuitive eating rather than passing on diet culture and food anxiety.”
These are the stories that tell you your coaching worked at the deepest level. These are the outcomes that matter more than twelve-week transformations. These are the changes that last not just for the duration of a coaching contract but for a lifetime.
There’s a principle I think of as practice-to-build: clients practice tracking to build pattern recognition. They practice pattern recognition to build intuition. They practice intuition to build practical wisdom. They practice practical wisdom to find freedom. And they practice freedom to truly live. That’s the trajectory. That’s the long game. That’s what we’re building.
Practical Implementation: Your Coaching Roadmap
Here’s a concrete framework for guiding a client to intuitive eating, and implementing this approach with your next client. Understanding the philosophy is important, but you also need practical tools to execute it. Think of this as a template you can adapt to individual circumstances while maintaining the core principles.
In the initial consultation, assess which stage the client is in. Most will be in Stage One (unconscious incompetence) but some might have previous tracking experience that puts them further along. Set expectations from this first conversation: “We’re going to use tracking as a learning tool, not a permanent requirement. The goal is to build your capability to manage your nutrition confidently without needing an app forever.” Paint the vision of where you’re headed: “Ultimately, we want you to be able to walk into any restaurant, any situation, and make good choices based on your own judgment and intuition. That’s where this is going. Tracking is just the vehicle that gets us there.”
In months one through three, you’re moving clients from Stage Two into Stage Three. Introduce tracking for awareness and education. Normalise the discomfort of conscious incompetence when it inevitably shows up. Constantly highlight what they’re learning: “Notice what you’re discovering about portion sizes. Notice how different foods affect your hunger. Notice energy density. You’re building a database of knowledge that you’ll use later.” Begin seeding Stage Four from day one: “You won’t track forever, so pay attention to what this looks like so you can recognise it visually later. Notice how you feel after meals, because you’re gathering data for when you’re not tracking.”
In months four through eight, you’re solidifying Stage Three. Support consistent tracking while actively building pattern recognition. This is where you introduce periodic “intuition checks”, where they eat intuitively for a meal or a day, then retroactively log it to compare their intuition to reality. This creates powerful feedback and builds calibration. Celebrate growing accuracy in their estimates. Watch for signs of diminishing returns: tracking has become routine and automatic, their learning has plateaued, they can estimate portions quite accurately, and/or they understand their body’s signals. When you see these signs, it’s time to transition.
In months nine through twelve, you’re actively transitioning to Stage Four. Begin systematic scaffolding removal using the progressive reduction approach I outlined earlier (track six days/intuitive one day, then five and two, then four and three, adjusting the pace based on their confidence and accuracy). Build the evidence portfolio by documenting and celebrating every successful intuitive experience. Normalise the wobbles: “This awkward phase is necessary and temporary. Every person who develops intuition goes through this.” Debrief every experience: “What did you notice? What worked? What would you adjust?” This is where pattern recognition deepens into practical wisdom.
From month twelve onward, the client should be primarily intuitive with optional periodic tracking for recalibration if desired. Some clients like to track for a week every few months just to check their calibration, and that’s fine. It’s a tool they know how to use when it’s helpful. Focus your coaching on confidence-building and autonomy. Address doubt when it shows up: “The fact that this feels easier means you’ve built competence. This is exactly where we wanted to get.” Celebrate the journey: “Look how far you’ve come; from not knowing what you didn’t know to trusting your own practical wisdom.”
Some clients will want occasional check-ins even after reaching Stage Four, and that’s perfectly fine. Provide support while reinforcing their capability. Frame it as: “You don’t need me, but I’m here if it’s helpful. You’re fully capable of managing this on your own, and these check-ins are about optimisation and support, not about dependency.” This maintains the relationship while honouring their development.
Guiding A Client to Intuitive Eating Final Thoughts
Adopting this approach requires a fundamental shift in how you think about your role as a coach. You’re shifting from provider of information to facilitator of wisdom, from macro manager to skill developer, from compliance monitor to autonomy supporter, from short-term results focus to long-term capability building, from creating dependency to creating independence.
This is harder coaching. It requires more psychological skill, more patience, more tolerance for client wobbles, and more trust in developmental processes. It’s easier to keep everyone in Stage Three tracking perfectly and hitting their macros. The numbers are clean. The progress is measurable. The client feels like they’re doing it “right.” But that’s not real coaching; that’s management. And it doesn’t build anything that lasts beyond your direct supervision.
The coaches who do this well understand that their greatest success is when clients no longer need them. They’re not building a client base of people dependent on their macro calculations forever. They’re building alumni who carry practical wisdom forward into their lives and often pass it to others. They’re creating ripple effects that extend far beyond the immediate coaching relationship.
Every client you guide through all four stages from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence, from external regulation to internal wisdom, from tracking dependency to nutritional phronesis, is a life changed. Not just a body transformed. A person empowered. A human being who has developed genuine capability and freedom in their relationship with food.
That’s the coaching that matters. That’s the work worth doing. That’s how we build people who can navigate the modern food environment with the same confidence and ease that their ancestors navigated the natural world; through embodied wisdom, pattern recognition, and practical judgment developed over time through lived experience.
You have the frameworks now. You understand the stages. You know the psychological principles. You’ve seen the timeline. You have the practical tools. So, the question is: Are you willing to coach this way? Are you willing to let go of being the macro calculator and embrace being the facilitator of phronesis? Are you willing to work yourself out of a job by building truly capable, truly independent clients? Are you willing to trust developmental processes even when they’re messy and uncertain? Are you willing to measure your success by client capability rather than just compliance?
If the answer is yes, then you’re ready to guide your clients on the journey from dependency to intuition, from tracking to trust, from rigid protocols to flexible practical wisdom.
Having said all of that, you do still need a working model of physiology, nutrition and training to actually get results. Otherwise, you’re just doing unstructured tinkering and calling it science. So, for those of you ready to take the next step in professional development, we also offer advanced courses. Our Nutrition Coach Certification is designed to help you guide clients through sustainable, evidence-based nutrition change with confidence, while our Exercise Program Design Course focuses on building effective, individualised training plans that actually work in the real world. Beyond that, we’ve created specialised courses so you can grow in the exact areas that matter most for your journey as a coach.
If you want to keep sharpening your coaching craft, we’ve built a free Content Hub filled with resources just for coaches. Inside, you’ll find the Coaches Corner, which has a collection of tools, frameworks, and real-world insights you can start using right away. We also share regular tips and strategies on Instagram and YouTube, so you’ve always got fresh ideas and practical examples at your fingertips. And if you want everything delivered straight to you, the easiest way is to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss new material.
References and Further Reading
Romano KA, Swanbrow Becker MA, Colgary CD, Magnuson A. Helpful or harmful? The comparative value of self-weighing and calorie counting versus intuitive eating on the eating disorder symptomology of college students. Eat Weight Disord. 2018;23(6):841-848. doi:10.1007/s40519-018-0562-6 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30155857/
Lucherini Angeletti L, Spinelli MC, Cassioli E, et al. From Restriction to Intuition: Evaluating Intuitive Eating in a Sample of the General Population. Nutrients. 2024;16(8):1240. Published 2024 Apr 21. doi:10.3390/nu16081240 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38674930/
Babbott KM, Cavadino A, Brenton-Peters J, Consedine NS, Roberts M. Outcomes of intuitive eating interventions: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Eat Disord. 2023;31(1):33-63. doi:10.1080/10640266.2022.2030124 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35400300/
Hensley-Hackett K, Bosker J, Keefe A, et al. Intuitive Eating Intervention and Diet Quality in Adults: A Systematic Literature Review. J Nutr Educ Behav. 2022;54(12):1099-1115. doi:10.1016/j.jneb.2022.08.008 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36274010/
Linardon J, Tylka TL, Fuller-Tyszkiewicz M. Intuitive eating and its psychological correlates: A meta-analysis. Int J Eat Disord. 2021;54(7):1073-1098. doi:10.1002/eat.23509 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33786858/