This is a special edition of the podcast featuring Triage Nutrition Coaches Brian & Dean, who joined Gary & Paddy to discuss the practice of nutrition coaching.
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Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated, so please excuse any errors:
Gary McGowan
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Triage Method Podcast with me, Dr. Garry McGowan and my colleagues. How are you gentlemen.
Paddy Farrell
And positively splendid Gary, everyone else?
Brian
Very well. I’m very well doing great.
Gary McGowan
Weather’s lovely. We’re all done in Clark this week. We’re recording a lot of content as part of today’s Media Week and it’s nice to be together with the guys, of course, missing our very own Luke Murray and Dr. Nicola Flanagan. But this week, what we want to talk about is the topic of nutrition coaching. Obviously, we have our best stellar nutrition coaches, Dean and Bryan here with us.
Gary McGowan
We have a nutrition certification. Me and Paddy obviously also coach nutrition and it’s a core part of what we do it trips. Therefore what we want to cover are the things that we feel you really need to know if you want to be the best nutrition coach you can and does help as many people as possible. Use nutrition to improve their health, performance and body composition.
Paddy Farrell
100%. So plus, where we start with this, we can start with this from the angle of, well, where would you start with a new client? And I feel like we’ve talked about that a lot on the podcast before. I know you guys have your own podcast where you also have done lots of case studies and everything, but I kind of want this to be a meta podcast in terms of what’s the overarching principles.
Paddy Farrell
So I know we’re going to start with this. Do we want to just go into the fundamental knowledge that you need to have about nutrition? Because I want this podcast to both have people who want to become nutrition coaches, people who are already nutrition coaches, or they’re like, I just I want to make sure I know what I should know, but I want it to be out for podcast.
Paddy Farrell
So do we start with the fundamental knowledge? Do we think that’s a good place to start?
Dean
Yeah, you do need to have the fundamental knowledge before they’re actually applying it to each individual plan. So I think it makes sense to start there. The fundamental knowledge is the basic nutrition science. You have to understand what’s in the food that you’re asking people to eat and whatever way you’re sort of creating dietary change for people. So the basic stuff like calories, you know, the the calorie values of different foods and how to calculate someone’s calories for their specific goals, you know, the different micronutrient splits of different food items, the protein, carbs, fats, alcohol, the micronutrient density of certain foods.
Dean
And, you know, generally you don’t have to be like super. It doesn’t have to be super. You’re not you don’t have to have a super deep knowledge in terms of like, yes, there’s this amount of vitamin C in this or this amount of vitamin A in this, but you should have at least some knowledge in terms of like, Right.
Dean
That is a good source of vitamin C or this food group over here is a good source of calcium because then that’s obviously what’s going to allow you to then create a wholesome fairy diet for a for your client, which is obviously, you know, you want to make sure that there are prioritizing their health as well as obviously their their fat loss muscle, again, performance goals and everything like that.
Dean
So I think like a general foundational knowledge of nutrition science as a as a starting point is super important. And then you can start from there and. Right. How do I actually communicate to this this to each clan based on what their goals are like?
Paddy Farrell
Obviously, I’ve created what I say. Obviously it’s obvious to us, but maybe it’s not obvious to the listener. But I created the nutrition coaching certification course that we have, and I thought about this a lot in terms of how do you strike the balance between teaching someone the fundamental knowledge and what actually is fundamental knowledge and then actually teaching them how to coach, Because I feel like that’s that’s the part that is often very it’s vague.
Paddy Farrell
It’s missing a lot of nutrition education. People aren’t really taught how to actually implement this stuff, but you can’t skip the foundational knowledge and just go straight to implementation. You know, you need to have a very solid understanding of, we’ll call it nutritional science perhaps, and that it comes back to calories. So you need to know the energy, like the energy contribution of food itself, the overall energy requirements of a human and how that changes giving in different circumstance is if you know someone is exercising and lot someone has a high, you know, baseline activity level, maybe someone is smaller, bigger, more muscle mass, more body fat, like how the body actually changes in terms
Paddy Farrell
of his energetic requirements. Again, you need to know that even though it’s not necessarily part of nutrition, it does have a huge bearing on our overall nutritional understanding and our overall nutritional approach. Right. So we can call it that kind of like calories in calories ash equation. That’s often the starting point that we use for a lot of people where, okay, we’re just to understand how many calories you need to put into this system based on how many calories you are able to eat.
Paddy Farrell
Right. And then we can manipulate around that if we have a fat loss goal, for example, if we just want to maintain our body weight, if we want to gain body weight, all that kind of stuff. Right. And I feel like if you understand that the concept, the energetic requirements, you’ve actually done a huge, huge amount in terms of furthering your nutritional knowledge because the vast majority of people don’t get that right.
Paddy Farrell
The vast majority of people, they overconsume food, they consume food and they or they’re just not sure about how much food that they should be eating. Right. So do you guys have anything to say on the energetic component as a foundational thought.
Brian
Foundational knowledge point, relational principle that like if you’re assembling a diet for somebody or some sort of nutrition protocol, if that now what what you’re looking for and what you’re actually trying to achieve with that and if you were missing that piece, then you’re just throwing reckless diets at people that don’t make any sense. So it’s incredibly important to have that that baseline understanding.
Paddy Farrell
And this is actually one of those things that you do see quite a lot in just the general population as well as with coaches, they focus too much on the protocols, the implementation of it rather than the actual baseline understanding. And this can translate to, for example, people are like, Oh, this is a good or bad food, right?
Paddy Farrell
And like, yes, there can be good or bad food for a given goal, but there’s no inherent good or bad food, right? And you can get really sidelined focusing too much on diet quality, which it is important. And we will talk about that now in a second. And you can focus too much on diet quality at the exclusion of focusing on the actual diet quantity.
Paddy Farrell
And I know we see this all the time. A lot of new clients come in. They say, look, I’m eating healthy, I’m eating a go to healthy diet, I’m eating good food choices. I see online that I should eat these kind of foods and I’m doing that, but I don’t have the body composition that I want or I don’t have.
Paddy Farrell
I’m not fulfilling the energetic requirements for my given goal, you know? So again, it is really important to get that fundamental understanding of calories energy, because it is literally the base of the pyramid. You can’t do anything else, you or your body. You could do everything else on top of that, but you’re always going to be on shaky foundations, right?
Paddy Farrell
Would you guys agree with that?
Dean
Yeah, Like, I think the when you look at the population, what are some of the issues that they are experiencing with their house on higher Is nutrition feeding into that? Well, one of the things is as they’re finding equals energy toxicity, they’re consuming toxic levels of calories to the point where it’s creating a lot of overweight and obese individuals with that, which then downstream affects their health.
Dean
Obviously, there is diet quality considerations with like nutrient deficiencies and people might look at eating a fiber and too much saturated fat and all the rest of it. But as you say, I like a lot of the times when someone comes to us and they have a fat loss goal, one of the first things that we’re trying to do is modify their calorie intake because they’re essentially going through life, through this obesogenic environment where they are encouraged to overconsume calories for a variety of reasons, obviously.
Dean
And but yeah, as a nutrition coach, you need to have an understanding of how to manipulate someone’s calorie intake to then help them obviously change their energy intake and achieve their their health and all body composition, performance goals, etc..
Gary McGowan
Yeah. And the name of our company triage is something that’s really important to consider here too, because the name has nothing to do with the number three or anything, as people often think there’s four of us here. There’s like, Oh no, what are you going to do if it’s not three of you? It’s quite, yeah, class. No, not a quad between us and three.
Gary McGowan
But triage comes back to initially it comes from the battlefield in medical care, in the battlefield. But if you go into any hospital, what you’ll see is a triage. And the whole idea of triage is that you pick the patients or you pick the problems that are most important to deal with right now. And the others then get dealt with down the line.
Gary McGowan
So when we look at public population health and the health of a lot of the clients that present to us when we look at their number one problem that needs to be taken care of, it’s often the energy content of the diet. There are loads different methods we can use to modify that, but that’s the problem We need to deal with.
Gary McGowan
So if you were to come in to us and we start worrying about your zinc status or selenium status or something along those lines, that may very well be a problem. Just like a chest infection might be a problem for someone who’s come in with a fractured pelvis. But which problem are you going to deal with first? It’s the pelvis.
Gary McGowan
And in this case it’s going to be the energy content of the diet, rather than stressing about the other nuances, which we will deal with down the line in succession.
Paddy Farrell
Yeah. Again, as a nutrition coach, you see this all the time where people you get to enamored with the specific protocol that you got results with or that you find works for. A lot of the clients that come to you, you know you don’t or what I like, I get like I’ll say like the paleo diet or keto or whatever, but they can all work.
Paddy Farrell
There’s potentially nothing wrong with these. You know, we’re calling fad diets are often called and we’re seeing kind of diets, styles and but they only work by virtue of the energetic stuff. So you kind of want to go to the source, you kind of want to understand, okay, well I understand the energetic components, I understand the calories and all that kind of stuff.
Paddy Farrell
I can be tool agnostic. I can use whatever type of diet. I can use a variety of different methods for a variety of different clients or even within the same client, because you understand the foundational principles rather than only understanding or only knowing, rather the protocols. You know, I’m just saying yeah.
Brian
Kind of mean. Gary You often refer to the fact that the more you learn about human physiology and nutrition, medicine and all that stuff, it just, it just reconfirms for you that it just comes back to this baseline issue.
Gary McGowan
Absolutely. And a client of mine, to me of just the other day, you know, he was saying to me, look, Gary, I’ve a fair idea of what I’m doing, but I have just about enough knowledge to be dangerous. And I think that’s a beautiful way of putting it, because what happens when people are naturally starting to study nutrition is they’ll start learning something like nutritional biochemistry and they learn about the metabolism of different nutrients and things like that.
Gary McGowan
And you think when you start on that journey that there’s going to come a point where I’m going to understand all the different hacks for metabolism and the special dietary strategies. But what I have found and I’m sure what all of us have found is that the more experienced you become, both practically and in terms of your knowledge, the more you actually end up simplifying your approach using smaller range of tools, even though the toolbox itself is larger.
Gary McGowan
So that’s something you’ll see with all advanced cultures.
Paddy Farrell
Okay, So you need to understand calories, information about the macronutrients. Now, we could go from calories. You know, if you understood energy and you could just focus on food quality. And that goes to some degree. Look after the macronutrients, especially if you have the kind of diet style that we often recommend. But I think if we understand the macronutrients first, then we can actually build a better diet quality on the back end of that by virtue of the food choices we make to actually get those micronutrients right.
Paddy Farrell
So if you are a coach, you’re going to have to understand macronutrients. Now for the overall or the vast majority of people that you’re likely to deal with as a coach, or if you’re listening to this and you want to learn yourself, you’re just looking for improvements in your health, fitness, body composition, whatever. The probably the two biggest levers you have to pull are calories.
Paddy Farrell
So we were in talked about that and in protein intake because the vast majority of people are not getting enough protein in their diet. And obviously some people potentially are increasingly overconsuming it. You know, you might see like bodybuilders, for example, they very often overconsume protein at the expense of other macronutrients that might actually be more beneficial for them.
Paddy Farrell
Right. So we need to have an understanding of the macronutrients, but we also have to understand that there is a bit of a hierarchy, right? So we need to, again, in calories, understand that, understand how much protein you need to assign effectively to a client. But and we’ll talk about this a little bit in a second in terms of implementation, but you can’t just give them a number.
Paddy Farrell
Well, you can’t, right? I’m not going to be effective. I often do that as well when a lot of my clients where I go, I want you to hit this number and then I’m going to see how you go about that and then we can adjust from there. Right. But that’s again, an implementation, right? But what you do need to know if you’re going to say, Oh, I need you to eat 150 grams of protein, you should have a good idea in terms of what that looks like as food and then how that would be proportioned out across the day, Right?
Paddy Farrell
Because humans don’t eat macronutrients. They do. But if I tell you, oh, unity 50 protein, you’re not going, oh, need 50 protein, you’re going, okay, I need to eat chicken, I need to be you know, you’re thinking of foods, so you have to know what kind of foods are available to that person. And they’re they’re going to be able to use that target.
Paddy Farrell
Right. And this applies for carbohydrates as well. And fats and the two of them, you can kind of interchange them in terms of they are energy substrates, which, you know, it’s just basically providing energy to the diet, which we talking about in terms of calories. However, there are some kind of delineating factors within that. Like certain goals, certain populations are going to do better with a higher fat diet, a lower fat diet, a higher carb, lower carb approach, you know, so you kind of have to be a little bit agnostic to the exact percentages that you assign to these.
Paddy Farrell
Like, you can’t just be like, oh, I’m just a low fat guy. I just only do 10%, five diets or whatever, right? So it is important you understand both of them, the reasons why you want to have lots and lots of reasons why you want to have carbohydrates in the diet, you know, all that kind of stuff. What populations are going to do better with more or less of that nutrient?
Paddy Farrell
And then also you kind of have to look at it and know what deficiencies are, what things are going to occur if I don’t get a certain food in the diet, because this is something that coaches very often forget. It’s like you’re saying, Oh, I just want you to drop ten grams of fat out of your diet, right?
Paddy Farrell
And all of a sudden that person has to change their diet massively. Now, unable to eat the foods that they enjoy, they’re not able to live their lives. They’re not able to engage in nutrition like they actually want to. And then it also actually needs to actual deficiencies, which might be an issue or may not be an issue.
Paddy Farrell
Like, for example, you might begin cutting fat and this person is just getting very little omega threes in their diet as a result because they’re like, Oh, well, I’m not going to have a 40 foot of like fish or something because that’s too many calories for me. And I’m only on 40 grams of fat. So it doesn’t happen, you know?
Paddy Farrell
And so we do have to be aware of that, which feeds very directly into our understanding of the overall food matrix and what we all do in terms of food quality, the food choices that you are making. Right. And I’ll give you floor to everyone else for the finding. I want to say is once you have that understanding of calories and macronutrients, then you can almost exclusively focus on foods, right?
Paddy Farrell
The food choices that you actually make, which makes you such a better coach because you can actually talk to people in the language that they actually speak. Again, I know I said earlier, people aren’t even macronutrients. They’re eating food. So if you go, oh, well, like this is what I want you to eat across a day in terms of the macronutrients, the calories.
Paddy Farrell
And this is what it kind of looks like in terms of this is, you know, breakfast choices would look like this. Lunch choices would look like this, dinner choices would look like this. And you can speak to them in an actual food manner. And improved and overall diet quality as a result of that.
Dean
Like, I think the translation of everything that you described there and the specific foods is the key thing. The key thing that makes you a nutrition coach because like, you know, you could have a guy who has a Ph.D. in nutrition science, but, you know, he could he could understand all of the intricacies of, you know, the protein specific foods or whatever it is or protein as a micronutrient.
Dean
Like he might have a Ph.D. in protein as an example, but like an nutrition coach is going to be able to disseminate that information and then be able to say to the client, okay, I understand what dietary changes is going to move you from where you are now to where you want to be. And that’s the whole reason why you’re paying me.
Dean
But I’m going to codify that and actually speak your language. And that’s part of that. I’m sure we talk about there the actual coaching psychology. You want to speak the language, the same language as your clients. Don’t be using jargon and stuff like that. But that is the key thing. You know, as you said, like I think you were joking earlier or yesterday in the gym about, you know, when you start your coaching journey, you’re kind of a little bit like a pirate.
Dean
You know, you’re just sort of like you’re choreographed, as.
Paddy Farrell
You said, choreography, just part of choreography. This is what I was told to do. This is just what I do.
Dean
And it’s, you know, it’s it’s not like you’re just sort of like relaying the information verbatim, like, perfectly to your client without actually understanding or like, why would I why would I give this plant this type of dietary structure? So as an example, like the protein guidelines say at 1.6 to 2.3 grams per K, Right. So that’s like I think that that across the board is a pretty good recommendation.
Dean
However, if you have a guy that comes into these 200 gig, you know you’re not going to give him 2.3 grams of protein per per kilogram body weight, that would be ridiculous.
Gary McGowan
You know.
Dean
So it’s like you you then have to sort of say, Right, well, I have to adjust my estimations to meet this plant because I understand fundamentally why am I giving this guy protein? Why? That’s for muscle mass maintenance and that’s for appetite regulation, etc., etc.. And but, you know, it’s not helpful for me to doggedly stick to these recommendations, even though the recommendations are fairly rock solid across the board.
Dean
But because you understand the principles of why you would give someone protein, you can then make more tailored recommendations and then obviously translate it into food.
Paddy Farrell
So that brings us to the next point, which is implementation, right? So it’s very easy to find information about nutrition science, but there’s a whole branch of science dedicated to it. You can go to your research papers, you can go to books, you can go to, you know, educated individuals. There’s so much free information online, like we have a foundations of nutrition article on the website, and you can go to that and you can come away with a phenomenal level of understanding of, Oh, this is what a good diet setup generally looks like, right?
Paddy Farrell
That information is actually really readily available. So at a baseline, if you are a nutrition coach and you don’t know about that, you need to really refocus on that stuff, right? So that’s edited with the actual key. The thing that distinguishes someone from being like an okay kind of nutrition coach to being really good nutrition coach, to be able to really help people with their nutrition is the actual implementation of that.
Paddy Farrell
And we often talk about having like a big toolbox. So you have many tools depending on the job, you’re going to use a different tool for the different individual depending on, you know, what they have going on in their life, what their goals are, etc., etc.. Right? But you can only have that big toolbox if you understand the fundamentals, if you understand how to in just a diet based on someone’s needs.
Paddy Farrell
Right. But we still need to translate that foundational knowledge into something that people can actually do. Right. And we use a variety of approaches, but what are the kind of approaches that we teach on the course is we have what we call tiers, right? And these kind of nutrition tiers, there’s three of them. The first one is more of a kind of what we say, habit based approach to things where you’re just focusing on a where if you follow these habits on a day to day basis, your nutrition is kind of naturally going to improve or it’s going to get to a level that is closer to what we ultimately want, right?
Paddy Farrell
So we can focus on the habits of Tier one. And then Tier two is really more focused about portion control. Now, there’s still some degree of portion control in the habits, and that’s part of it. But the portion control in Tier two is having a more formal phased approach in terms of, Oh, this is what our plate should look like, How much percentage or proportion of that place should be protein versus carbohydrates versus phosphorus as vegetables, those kind of things.
Paddy Farrell
Right. So we’re still talking to the individual a lot of areas. And again, food focused way in terms of, oh, these are the kind of foods that you should be eating. This is the kind of proportion your meals should follow. And then in tier three, it’s much more focused on calories and macronutrients and common calorie macronutrient tracking. And you might think, oh, well, I’ll just go to tier three.
Paddy Farrell
That’s the most scientific, that’s the best way to go about things. But that’s not necessary for everyone. I mean, if that’s the approach you take where you’re just like, Oh, I only ever use this one approach, this one implementation tool with all my clients, you’re going to fall behind. You’re going to be able to help as many people.
Paddy Farrell
And yes, you’re going to be able to help some people because obviously certain tools work for certain jobs, but it’s not a kind of more holistic approach to nutrition where you can have multiple people with us, that kind of thing. So guys, you’re going to say on the implementation aspect.
Brian
Yeah, I like the tiers. The Tier one Tier two is kind of the scaffolding or a skeleton for tier three anyway, right?
Paddy Farrell
So yeah. And also, yeah, like if you’re doing tier three, you’re still doing Tier one. I’m still doing tier two.
Brian
But if someone is like a very raw beginner in terms of their nutrition, their lifestyle, so like they’ll get a lot of benefit from just working on the Tier one habits, for example. And if they’re doing that, like, you know, three to 3 to 4 meals per day and they’re eating protein at every meal, well then it makes it more likely that they’re going to be closer to their Tier three targets if they get that far.
Brian
You know, And then by blocking, you get more portion control and tier two. Yeah, it makes it more likely. So then what they do transition into tier three, it’s kind of slotting into place already and then you’re just fine tuning it rather than they they’re having to learn like this completely from scratch because if you just give someone numbers and without any sort of extra guidance, then like they, they could do that very easily.
Brian
And their food direct look a bit all over the place because if you, if you haven’t given them any direction on how to go about this.
Paddy Farrell
Which this is one of those things you do see all the time where people use something like calorie and macro tracking and they’re like, okay, I got the results while I was doing this, but then, you know, they go, I don’t I don’t want to do my fitness part anymore. And then they go away from that and all of a sudden they haven’t built any good food habits.
Paddy Farrell
They don’t know roughly how to structure their meals or their day to keep them feeling full, keep them feeling energetic, etc.. So they just fall off track because they’re they’re not using a tool. Right. But that’s why we need to have this, again, a more holistic approach to things. And we need to be strategy or protocol agnostic. We’re simply viewing them as a tool in our toolbox, right?
Paddy Farrell
If you do calorie and macro tracking, that can be phenomenal. You can even stop people that have a very low level understanding of nutrition and everything and go, I just want you to hit these targets. Right? And then they hit the targets. But if that’s where it stops, that’s it’s not really all that helpful. Right. And again, it can work.
Paddy Farrell
It’s I’ll say it’s about approach. And some people, they just they just like that approach. I personally like calorie and macro tracking. Right. But for a lot of people they’re going to need way more attention to, oh, well, how do we structure your day? Are you eating before your training in the morning? Like what is a meal look like?
Paddy Farrell
You need to build those kind of fundamental habits across the day that then allow you to build a nutrition structure so that when you’re 70 years old, you still have a good holistic approach to nutrition rather than, Oh, I just have to use my fitness power to, you know, make sure I’m hitting my calorie and macronutrient targets, which again, it’s not about approach works phenomenally for a lot of people.
Paddy Farrell
It can actually be a phenomenal tool, phenomenal a launching point for other stuff down the road. But it is just a tool. So do you guys have anything to say in terms of implementation by virtue of different strategies or protocols that you might use with people and maybe you might say something on like how you kind of think about approaching different clients?
Paddy Farrell
Because while I did say earlier on that a lot of people like the nutrition science stuff is very readily available and again, you should definitely have a good grasp of that if you want to be a nutrition coach. The unfortunate thing is a lot of protocols are strategies, whatever you want to call them, are also readily available in terms of people say, Oh, keto diet, that’s that’s an implementation tool, right?
Paddy Farrell
So who’s going to you do the keto diet? Are you going to do a paleo diet? We’re just going to do X, y, Z diet. So it’s just a strategy that’s very accessible. But there’s no like joined of thinking in terms of where it fits into a larger understanding of nutrition and a larger framework for Oh yeah, that might be appropriate for X clients, but it’s not appropriate for a Y client, right?
Paddy Farrell
So do you guys want to start with start with Brian, Maybe you want to talk about anything you potentially do strategy wise, protocol wise, when you’re kind of starting with someone?
Brian
Yeah, I mean, I usually start with the protein elements and then once you get that squared away, you know, I will inform people in terms of, okay, portions of these foods will give you that much protein. And if you do that several times per day, and then you’ll probably hit those targets. And whether they’re tracking or not, like I’ll know kind of where I want them to be.
Brian
So I’m just give them like, okay, it’s this amount of protein rich foods and then let them structure their day with that and we’ll, you know, I’ll have an idea of where I want their diet to get to. You know, I talk about it a lot as like going from A to B, so going from average diet to brilliant diet.
Brian
So I want to hold their hand in terms of making those changes and saying, okay, I know where we want to get to. I’m going to start with where you’re currently as in terms of your diet, and we’ll start making modifications to that based on like, you know, quite small, simple suggestions that aren’t going to be overwhelming for the person.
Brian
And then we review that and we take it from there and we look at the foods that they’re eating and it’s little by little improving the whole process. So that’s like, you know, it’s not a specific protocol, but it is.
Paddy Farrell
But that’s what we want for our current overall like framework, the thinking rather than the exact implementation to us. Like you’re basically saying like, I’m going to help this person focus on their habits to kind of move them in the direction. And also there’s a degree, of course, you can draw stuff in there to move them in the direction that you ultimately want to do and you have an understanding of calories, macronutrients, all those kind of things.
Paddy Farrell
So you know what a good diet would look like from a quantitative point of view and also a qualitative point of view where you’re like, oh, like this is good food choices are probably going to revolve around leaner meats. For example, a lot of fresh, really red, fresh food. I can even speak fresh fruit and veg. And then I go into components of the diet like I’m like, okay, well, you know, you are eating an excessive amount of saturated fat or whatever.
Paddy Farrell
And I change that around or, you know, through choices across the week. You’re not getting any fatty fish. You might be, you know, not eating enough omega three for, you know, different things like that. But it’s not a one size fits all. Oh, we’re going to do this like your actual tools. It’s kind of like here I have a framework for how I like to do things, but if someone comes to you and they’re further along in the process, like, they’re like, My diet is generally good.
Paddy Farrell
I just need a little bit out of making it perfect. Thank you. You’re not going to start it, okay. We’re just going to focus on the protein and they’re like, okay, I’m going, I’m already doing that. Like, are you paying attention? You know? So the tool, the protocol, the system is not the end goal. The end goal is actually building a good diet.
Paddy Farrell
And the way you go about that can be very different.
Brian
Yeah. And there’s there’s just fundamental things to get nailed down. And the things like fruit, vegetable intake, things like protein intake, overall diet quality. And, you know, you can see what someone is doing with an education and just help them make those changes and let them know like, okay, here’s what you can do here to get you further along with where you want to be.
Brian
And then it depends on, you know, the person, what they’re the limiting factors are. You know, for that you’re trying to eliminate like deficiencies. I’m not smoking in like the strict.
Paddy Farrell
Nutrition micronutrient.
Brian
And yeah it’s not it’s not or crazy migration deficiency we’re just looking at like okay one of the sort of glaring holes in this person’s approach, their nutrition currently and how can we go about shoring them up so they entry using triage approach and then other specific strategies around that will just be dependent on like what does this person’s lifestyle look like?
Brian
You know, what can choose? They like to eat, you know, are they hungry in the morning, for example, if they’re not And, you know, does that mean they’re a candidate for like intermittent fasting if they need some degree of help with energy control, which, you know, most people do maybe they’re low time that it for that in that case and that’s a two hour use with some people but again never going to be just like the intermittent fasting guy and that’s the only tool in the toolbox.
Brian
So like just another way you can approach this and there are so many ways and you get creative with like as well when you’re looking at the person, but it’s, you know, it’s going to be tailored to the individual, I think to say, okay, well, this is what this person’s life looks like and this is what their nutrition is currently looking like And these are the issues they’re having is what they need help with.
Brian
So let me think about that as a coach and how I’m going to actually help them resolve this. Right. And you can test and try things. You know, you can you can try different things of people. And, you know, people probably know I work with a lot of people with like disordered eating issues and correlation is the food, etc..
Brian
So, you know, they may have expect that, you know, I wouldn’t impose kind of rules on the diets. Okay.
Paddy Farrell
Bush actually just hold out there for a second because the approach that I like to for most people, I like, okay, we’re going to use calorie and macro tracking and then I’m going to basically go, I want you to hit these calories and I want to get these macronutrients right. Go away, sink or swim. Right. Throw you in the deep end here, and people come back and they go, oh, like I tried this.
Paddy Farrell
You know, I didn’t I fell short of my protein or, you know, I wasn’t going into fiber or whatever. Right. So then we can go, Oh, let’s tidy up the diet here. Oh, this is why you fell short. Oh, this day you did incredibly well with your protein intake. So we’ll use this as a kind of scaffold for protein intake in future days.
Paddy Farrell
Right. So what? I kind of like that sink or swim approach doesn’t work for everyone. And we’ll come back to. That’s why I interrupted you. But that’s the approach I like. That’s the general kind of framework I’ll use with a lot of clients to make sure I’m listening to this. You’ll see that I do this like, let’s do calorie tracking, and then we start working on different habits, different foods structure, different things to really make that a more cohesive diet for you as an individual.
Paddy Farrell
But that kind of approach, if I was to just use that with someone that’s coming to me with like binge eating or a poor relationship with food, maybe they tried calorie and macronutrient tracking before and now they’re like this. This literally gave me anorexia because I was just trying to get the number down as low as possible. Like, if that’s the only choice, this is the only tool that I have.
Paddy Farrell
Even if you go look, that’s actually a pretty good tool. I like to think at least has a pretty good protocol strategy, overarching framework for thinking about nutrition. Well, approaching nutrition, it’s not going to work for this person, so I’m just not going to be able to help this person if that’s the only tool that I have, the only protocol that I have, and it’s a good protocol, but you have to have more tools in your toolbox.
Brian
And you have to take a flexible approach and not just in the sense that, you know, using flexible diet or anything like that, using an inclusive approach needs to be flexible and, you know, don’t be rigid in having to stick to your own go in that you might have, you know, so that that client is referring to. And she was an ABC doctor and she was eating quite a lot of, you know, treats and kind of junk food across the day, like disproportionate amount of energy coming from those foods.
Brian
A lot of that stuff was just her grabbing stuff as she was running around the house. You’re busy. Yeah, right. And, you know, raising food wasn’t like fantastic when we started. So if I had just said, okay, well, she doesn’t realize she says, I kind of feel like restrictions on her because I will be bad for that. BUSH Like thinking about it more broadly, like, okay, look, how about you?
Brian
You can make a commitment not to eat that kind of food when you’re in work. Because I talk about it as being kind of very low value or low yield, like you’re running around and just grabbing biscuits like, you know, I can taste in the stuffing, not really enjoying it. So you’re just kind of grabbing as you go, Why it’s not really doing anything for you.
Brian
So I said, okay, let’s strike a deal here. You only eat that sort of stuff in a sort of high yield environment, which is often when people are at home for the evening, they’ve had their dinner and stuff and they can actually sit down and enjoy some sort of dessert type thing. All right. So we may.
Paddy Farrell
I often call it I’m like, these foods are not off limits. Like they’re not like you’re never allowed eaten. They’re just not high priority. You’re like, you can eat them. Not saying you can’t, but they’re not our first choice. They’re not the thing that we’re going to prioritize in the diet.
Brian
Yeah. So like we set that up as like, you know, our rules, so to speak. I work for you out and her relation with food are better and her diet got better, health got better. All goes out better, right? By sort of being flexible with how I’m thinking about this based on the individual.
Paddy Farrell
Gary, do you have any strategies or protocols or how do you kind of think about, you know, starting someone’s diet? What kind of implementation do you use?
Gary McGowan
Yeah, a core question that I like to ask, especially if I have no place to set, is when do you eat and why do you eat what you eat? Like that’s actually a really important question that we probably don’t ask in office coaches most of the time, because it’s not always just hunger and it’s certainly not always just energy needs and what you’ll often find is that people in that situation see it all the time in the hospitals.
Gary McGowan
You know, a patient might drop in a box of chocolates for the nurses because, you know, they did a good job minding her mother, for example. And I always I was talking with a client about this last week. There’s sort of an obligation. It’s all it almost feels like if I’m at work and I’m getting something for free, we never get anything for free.
Gary McGowan
And chocolate at work is bad enough. I should get stuck into that. But like Brian said, it doesn’t often provide the same reward as if you’re having the chocolate bar relaxing in the evening with your cup of tea. It’s planned. It’s a much nicer experience. So when do you eat and why do you when you eat? Is it is it stress?
Gary McGowan
Is this you know that like at work when you’re just super busy, you’ve got you’re after getting free food or is it the food environment around you? And then how can we modify those things? Because you’d be surprised how much of a difference that could actually make to the quality of your nutrition, because most people sabotage their diets not by the decisions they make when they’re cooking their meals, they’re often the good decisions.
Gary McGowan
It’s the snacking, it’s the picking, it’s the food that’s dropped into work. So if you can get control of those things, that’s absolutely huge. And those two questions are core for nutrition. Coach.
Paddy Farrell
Yeah, I think that why as well like you can ask that in so many different ways. Like for example you might have a client that is just like I’m really struggling to get enough protein in and then you look at their food and you’re like, you literally don’t eat any protein at breakfast. And you know, why is that?
Paddy Farrell
You know, Oh, well, the entire time that I was growing up and we just didn’t have any high protein breakfast foods, you know, I would never eat meat for breakfast, for example. I would I wouldn’t eat any like, you know, maybe Greek yogurt or anything like that. It’s just not in there, like food vocabulary. Right. And you ask them why and then logically, they’re like, that’s just the way I’ve always done tried and that’s not bad or good, But they just don’t have the framework, They don’t have the thinking because it’s just it’s just not on their their radar, because it’s just never been something that they do.
Paddy Farrell
And you can then go, Well, we can actually eat some food, we can actually eat some protein for breakfast. You don’t have to have this arbitrary food rule that you’ve made for yourself based on your overall cultural conditioning or whatever your upbringing, where you just don’t eat protein for breakfast. Right. And it might be hard it might be hard to really, you know, implement that.
Paddy Farrell
And like with snacking and stuff, again, like if you’re a nurse or whatever, it might be hard to say, no, you’re going to reject this gift that someone has given you to celebrate the fact that you’ve done a great job like it’s very hard to stop those kind of things, but it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. I mean, we can still work on us to improve the diet overall.
Paddy Farrell
So I do definitely agree with that. Kind of like asking more and actually connecting more and getting people to think about their diet a little bit more. What are you doing? Trend like strategies, implementation tools, protocols that you kind of you know.
Dean
I just want to linger a little bit in terms of what it is, what you just talked about there, because I think at the start of the podcast we talked about, right, calories, macros, understanding the fundamental principles. But I think the hallmark of a really good nutrition coach is their ability to zoom out and look at what food represents in multiple different domains of a client’s life.
Dean
Right? So obviously we have the whole thing of right. We need to we need food to stay alive. Food obviously has influences on our sporting goals, food influences, our body composition. But as you said there, Gary, there is a social aspect of food, you know, the sweets in and work. You know, when you go to any social event, whether it’s a wedding, a christening, you know, a birthday party, you know, the more sort of like, you know, any sort of function really, there is food.
Dean
There’s also going to be alcohol. But food is a big component of that. And that is similar across all cultures in our history, really, you know, is just the central role of food. And thus there’s all of these different components that influences our food decision making. You know, as I say, the brand, you work with so many people and I myself work with people who have issues with emotional eating, you know, And it’s it’s in the two words, they’re emotional eating.
Dean
There is this emotional connection to food. So, you know, having the fundamental knowledge of, you know, the biochemistry, the physiology, you know, the metabolic consequences of eating X, Y, Z, that’s really important. But once you came out of the baseline of that covered, you then want to make sure that you’re considering all of these other interlinking factors that influences food with within you’re within your clients.
Dean
And if you’re working with people’s nutrition and within their lives because as I say, like, you know, it might be a simple sort of like, well, why don’t you just eat more protein? But it’s like, as you said, Oh, well, that’s it’s not something that I never did. You know, I had this sort of like generation of family belief system that has been brought down.
Dean
It’s like it’s weird to eat protein white You know, some some people like that they’ve gone through most of their life, maybe from an economic standpoint or a financial standpoint or maybe not having enough money to to sort of eat a diet that is, you know, varied. And, you know, maybe breakfast was a thing that they never ate and their impact in their whole life, it was just like you got water in a cup of tea and on you went to school.
Dean
And it’s funny because like when you ask like whenever I’m talking to my dad or my mom about, you know, what their, what the sort of the food represented for them back in the day. It’s came like the whole thing of you got sweets once a week after months, whereas now it’s like kids have sweets every day, maybe twice a day.
Dean
They’re inundated with choice whenever they go into the shop, you know. So food represents quite a lot in our life. And it’s not just like, we’ll just take your calories or just eat more protein or whatever it is. Yes, that stuff’s obviously important. But having this having the ability to zoom out and look at. Right. Why is this person making these food decisions?
Dean
And I’m sort of considering these social, emotional, economic factors that are all going to have a strong influence on what they’re what they’re doing from day to day, week to week, month to month.
Paddy Farrell
Yeah. One of those things you can really do as well as where you ask people to like actually the question, I mean, like where did you learn this? You know, like where, who taught you this? Because, you know, I’m sure you’ve all had this process happen to yourself where there’s just the fact that you were told as a child, you know, in school or whatever, and you just go, okay, I’ve no contacts, I’ve no broader understanding.
Paddy Farrell
So that must be reality. These people that are, you know, more powerful, more knowledgeable, whatever my teacher told me, X, Y, or Z, so I’ll just accept it. And then as a teenager or as an adult or whatever, you know, hold on. I’ve now just been presented with information that’s just completely different that that thing that they told me is just completely wrong.
Paddy Farrell
You know, like you were effectively lied to, not know that you’re running like a malicious means or whatever. It’s just the person got it wrong right. And that’s just something that you believe your whole life. And it’s kind of the same with nutrition, where someone taught you how to eat this way. Someone taught you how to eat this diet for some of the language you especially as children like your parents, just effectively allow you to eat a certain way.
Paddy Farrell
But it doesn’t mean that it’s right and it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person for eating that way. But you do have to kind of question like, why did all these food rules that you’ve created for yourself that potentially aren’t serving you right now? Like who taught you that? Who made you eat that way? Or who kind of showed you how to eat that?
Paddy Farrell
Right. Right. And that is an important question to ask, because sometimes you just come across these things again, like I said, or drawn or you just go, Oh, that was wrong. I never just have to update my approach, okay, I can I can do something else. And it just takes a little bit of like eye opening where you go, Oh, I can actually do something else.
Paddy Farrell
I don’t just have to fall back on the habits that were ingrained as a child, you know? And I don’t know if you guys have anything else to say before we move on to the next point.
Brian
Just on my points, it’s a really useful question to ask yourself as a coach as well. How do I know what I know? Because you should challenge yourself pretty regularly in terms of like, okay, is this advice based on not evidence or, you know, that I’m trying to pick this up somewhere and is it still accurate? So yeah, I started asking your clients how they know what they know.
Brian
They’re not asking yourself how you know, what you know is super, super important. Yes.
Paddy Farrell
100%. And every time as you’re speaking, you manage to bring it to you as well as a coach. I would argue that one of the fundamental things that you do have to really build and understand is the ability to be compassionate, empathetic and actually communicates when an individual in front of you. Because even though we’ve been talking about nutritional science, that’s very much removed from the actual lived experience for most people, and even though we’ve been talking about the kind of implementation and different kind of strategies or protocols, all of that is useless if you can’t actually effectively talk to the person in front of you kind of vaccine to effectively help them with their
Paddy Farrell
nutrition because you can’t communicate with them. I don’t mean you speak a different language. I mean you’re not actually able to convert the nutritional biochemistry or whatever that, you know, into something that makes sense for them. And I’m not trying to infantilize or make people be stupid or something like if I say protein, like I think you’re intelligent enough to understand a protein and it’s rice and but it’s actually translating that information in a way that actually makes sense given their context for the overall diet.
Paddy Farrell
So you’re going to say, look, you know, coaches are going, well, how do I actually build, you know, compassion, empathy and communication skills?
Brian
Yeah, I think they’re super important traits to have in terms of like building empathy and building compassion. I’m not sure how much of that is, you know, just sort of nature versus nurture, how much of that you can learn. But you definitely learn compassionate approaches to all sorts of things, really. But I think fundamentally, you don’t care about your client. Like.
Paddy Farrell
Well, you’re probably in the wrong game.
Brian
You’re going to be. Yeah. And hopefully you haven’t got into the business in terms of nutrition coaching.
Dean
And I imagine Donald Trump as a nutrition coach would just be crazy like that.
Gary McGowan
Probably the greatest diet ever.
Brian
I mean, you know, Gary, you doing a Q&A yesterday and someone say that they were doing a binge eating and they found a nutritionist to be quite cold in terms of. Yes. In terms of working with them. And I can see how that would happen. Like that person knows plenty about nutrition. They say, okay, here’s the diet that you need to follow to get the results that you want.
Brian
And if you can’t do it, they’re a bit like, What you mean you can’t do it?
Paddy Farrell
Yeah, it’s easy on paper things. Two things are probably.
Brian
Things that you just eat this way and.
Gary McGowan
Then just do it like.
Brian
So you have to think about the person that you’re dealing with and their life circumstances and you need to build rapport. And you know, it’s not unlike in, you know, a therapeutic set. And settings like the biggest predictor of success is that the relationship with the practitioner, right? So it’s not a million miles away from from actually coaching people like you know you build rapport, you have a good dialog with these people to, you know, help them figure out what they’re dealing with because like, you know, you see this a lot where Joe finds me really worry about disappointing you as a coach or let you down and all that sort of thing.
Brian
And that’s kind of hangover from.
Paddy Farrell
Drill sergeant and like, do what I tell you.
Brian
Yeah. Poor approach is that maybe maybe they’ve been exposed to you in the past like very aggressive kind of body transformations. That’s like the coach is just going for a great before and after, you know, they’re just going to push that person to the brink and they don’t really care if the person struggling is like, you know, dig in and, you know, get it done.
Brian
Which, you know, I was a terrible coach and a coach, terrible approach to coaching. You know, we we always talk about a client centered approach to coaching and and beat letting them be involved in the decision making process and all of that like facilitates a good client coach relationship where you know, I often use analogies which is an important aspect of coaching or for talking about communication because.
Paddy Farrell
Anyone this is a they’re aware that I enjoy an analogy. You know.
Brian
You’re great for analogies and you know the you should probably some of your only analogies I’m sure they’re they have their literature at the end the courses are at the certification but like people can respond or resonate with.
Brian
Like that. It makes a lot of sense to them. I think are using you as a she’s doing CrossFit and you know, she was trying to help her with her relation with food because it wasn’t great. She prone to binge eating and stuff like that and is getting into, do you know, much leading exercises that I get people to do in this context?
Brian
And I was like, look, this is like a workout for your relation, the food and the girl of the train. And that just clicked like that. She was like, Oh, of course. And then she was delighted to tell me every week that’s like, I did my workout, my, my food workout, right? And it’s fantastic. And it went really well.
Brian
That’s a that’s a good example of, you know, analogies and communication overall. But yeah, you have to I think in this earlier in terms of putting it into language that people can understand and remember, this applies to sort of the content you produce as well, like and you sort of social media space like you’re aiming at the people you want to help rather than your peers depending on what kind of business you’re in.
Brian
So I cannot or I shouldn’t talk to a layperson like I would talk to you guys necessarily about nutrition. You know, now, if they’re a coach themselves, which they often are, then yeah, it will expand on that. But then back to the fact that just your coaching skills overall, you know, to see the person in front of you and decide what’s going to be the better option for them.
Paddy Farrell
Yeah. And it actually doesn’t even come back to you like your overall approach to coaching someone. And obviously that’s what we’re talking about. But I mean, like actually even mediums that you use, like it would be so much easier for me to just reply to someone’s checking email or whatever with a voice down on WhatsApp and sometimes I will do that, right?
Paddy Farrell
But if someone asks me a lot of questions which I’m looking at and then going, you know, they’re probably going to they’re probably going to want to look these back up. They’re going to want to go, What did he say about that? It’s something that was going to apply to them in the future. Like, I’ll just type out a little paragraph or two about this thing because I know that they’ll be able to then refer back to that rattling on, Was it week 12 that, you know, Dean recorded a video for me and was it in that video or was it the week before?
Paddy Farrell
You know, and like we often do that as well. If I do record a video response to a thing, I’m like just bullet points, a few things in it. So again, they have something to refer back to in the future because again, it’s just the the way you actually communicate with that individual based on what they have. But going back to that kind of how do you teach this stuff, it is actually one of the harder things to do.
Paddy Farrell
It’s one of the things that we’re doing some course updates. It’s one of the things that I want to really focus on to like build on. And one of the things that appears to be very effective is it’s very, again, going back to these like analogies and metaphors, it’s very simplistic, but it’s like you need to learn how to listen like you’ve two ears and one man.
Paddy Farrell
So maybe listen twice as much as you speak. And I say that as someone who’s been quite a lot of. But you know, when you’re talking to someone, when you’re communicating with someone, you’re trying to be empathetic, you’re trying to be compassionate, they listen to them. And I don’t mean just a cursory listen. I’m like, Oh, yeah, they said that like actually try to dig a little bit deeper.
Paddy Farrell
I think it might involve asking more questions before you give your information. You know, it might be like, well, what do you mean by that? Or Sorry, I don’t quite understand. I don’t quite see how that applies to your situation or whatever. And obviously I’m not talking about asking stupid questions before you actually gave input. I mean, like actually try to get that individual in front of you to expand on what they’re experiencing either.
Paddy Farrell
And again, that kind of qualitative or quantitative way, if they’re saying whatever that you need to listen to what they’re saying. And it’s very hard to get that across. What good, effective listening actually is. Now, I don’t know if you guys have to add to that, otherwise I’m going to ask Brian about CBT and ACT.
Dean
And yeah, I think it links into to what you’re going to go into there because obviously we’ll talk we’re talking a little bit about what seems to be effective in the in the psychology literature, but one of the most transformative over the years things that that I have added to my coaching has been motivational interviewing, right in this kind of like center to to what you said there.
Dean
I think if you are trying to become a better coach and you’re satisfied with your fundamental knowledge of the nutrition, the Harvard Nutrition Science and you want to sort of develop your soft skills, I think motivational interviewing is a really, really good way of developing that because it teaches you effective ways, essentially of becoming a good listener. And it links into what we were talking about this sort of like compassionate, client centered, empathetic approach.
Dean
You know, that’s literally the spirit of AMA, as it’s called. You know, there’s there’s four or five points and that’s it’s categorized as peer. So partnership, acceptance, compassion and evocation. We don’t need to get into the specifics of that. But at the core of it is, as is essentially being with the person that’s with you and listening to what they’re trying to tell you.
Dean
And then you guiding them towards a destination that you know, was helpful. Because the thing about it is with coaching, you have an agenda and they have an agenda and your job as the coach is to try and get them to a place where they’re happier, healthier, they’re a lot more knowledgeable, etc., etc.. But the way the nice analogy that is used to describe this sort of motivational interviewing, really good listening is it’s like a dance.
Dean
You’re not just telling someone to do something, you’re not just saying, Gary, you need to go over there and do this because Gary’s going to be like, Go fuck yourself. You know, he’s not going to be, you know what? He might feel a little under the balls there, you know? But it’s like the whole thing of like when you’re a child and your mom says, Don’t touch, that’s hot.
Dean
What do you do? You want to test that, right? You want to sort of and, you know, people oftentimes don’t like don’t like being told what to do, even if it is within the context of a session where the goal is overall improvement. So I think before before you move on, like, you know, if you are a coach and motivational interviewing, check out the the book by Bill Miller on Stephen right next to him and there’s also like a bunch of different courses and stuff like that online.
Dean
We’re going to have our own courses in the future, no doubt. And because I think it’s a really good skill to add to your toolbox and it links very nicely into what you describe there. Apart in terms of this, we’ve been a really good listener.
Brian
Yeah.
Paddy Farrell
And you can say more from Brian.
Gary McGowan
Just one thing. And this is about, you know, we’re I was talking about communication as if, you know, it’s just about soft skills and it’s all qualitative, but that that’s not necessarily the case all the time either because we can also present very hard factual information in different ways that is actually better communication. For example, when people are losing weight, you have to ask yourselves where is their attention being drawn each day?
Gary McGowan
And their attention instead is being drawn to the scale of weight on that day and also to, for example, what they see in the mirror on that day. So people don’t spread their attention evenly over time. Obviously, it’s very moment focused, but what we can do as coaches is present in a different way. For example, showing someone a weight loss graph, that’s a form of communication.
Gary McGowan
What you’re doing is you’re taking all of that quantitative data that you have and presenting it to the client. Now they understand what’s going on a lot better. So it’s not just about saying all you weighed in US 83 kilos today, That’s okay. Don’t be so hard on yourself. That’s that’s not what communication is. Communication is also about taking all the quantitative information and saying, look at the graph over time.
Gary McGowan
Look at the the rate of change. And now they actually understand that problem better. Similarly, it could be a comparison between two sets of photos 12 weeks apart that they haven’t reflected on. So that’s that, that’s where it all comes together. It’s not just the kind of soft, fluffy stuff that’s really important, but it’s also about presenting data in different ways.
Gary McGowan
So your client understands that 1%.
Paddy Farrell
Brian ACT, CBT, anything about that.
Brian
These are additional things that you can learn about in terms of how people get results, because often people are hindered in their, their responses to certain things that happen in terms of their self-talk and terms of they’re thinking about things, you know, So if they go to an event and they feel like they overreached, then that can bring down an avalanche of shame and self-criticism.
Brian
And this is where things like acts is acceptance and commitment therapy or CBT cognitive behavioral therapy, where you can, you know, depending on which way the author offers similar kind of outcomes, I suppose. And there again, just tools in their own race course, you know, if people are having thoughts about, you know, that they’re they’ve ruined everything as a result, it comes out of hand and they’re terrible person.
Brian
They’re never going to be able to get all this stuff together. Like that’s where something like act can come in and can use techniques within their to help them, you know what the technique is called diffusion. So diffuse from that thinking and start to view thoughts as sort of transient mental events as opposed to something that I have to take on board and then and then actually informs my behaviour going forward.
Brian
So like those kind of psychotherapeutic approaches, whatever you want to call them, super useful in terms of coaching, because a lot of what we’re trying to do is, is behavior psychology, right? And you’re trying to often just get people out of their own way, especially with the people that I work with, with the emotional eating and the binge eating and stuff like that.
Brian
And know I often say to people that it’s like if you have whatever you might define as a slip or often what has a larger magnitude of an effect on you is how you respond to that and those that drag you into a spiral for days or weeks, you know, obviously not weeks if you’re actually getting coaching and could be if you’re doing this stuff on your own, does that drag you down for such a long time that you really have, you know, call to support damage as a result so you can get people thinking a bit more rationally about these things, learning how to manage their thoughts, manage their emotions a little bit better,
Brian
not be as reactive to them than as I say. You can help them get out of their own way and make better decisions around nutrition.
Paddy Farrell
It’s actually really quite interesting because in health and fitness world, you very often see people posting like the Daily Stoic. I read that on my story or a Post-it on their story on Instagram, the read a page or whatever it is every morning, and that’s phenomenal, right? Stoicism, great for CBT especially, is basically just partner assisted stoicism, right?
Paddy Farrell
I mean, you may have any important point there where it’s like, oh we’re just kind of reframing. Like you had these thoughts. For example, they don’t have to define you, all right? Or this event happened, this thing happened in your life like you kind of changed that. You can’t, you know, modify the event. You can only modify your response to it.
Paddy Farrell
Right. That’s kind of at the heart of stoicism. Right. And that’s what CBT acts are kind of about, act as a little slightly different course. And it’s interesting to note because the health and fitness community are generally quite resistant to using stuff like CBT or ACT or any of those kind of things. Yet they’ll jump headfirst into reading about stoicism in their own time, you know?
Paddy Farrell
So yeah, I don’t know. I think all those kind of tools, these kind of psychoanalytic tools, whatever you want to call them, and they can be really helpful. It doesn’t necessarily need to change your whole approach to things, but it can be really helpful for actually helping someone with their diet in this case or training or whatever.
Brian
You just end up more developed and then better, more capable and better able to help people because, you know, if at the start of your coaching career, all you have is what spoke about the start like nutrition fundamentals, some implementation, like that’s fair enough. No one expects you to start anywhere except there. That’s why we started with that.
Brian
But as you start to develop yourself as a coach, you’ll start to see how all this stuff fits together and say, I’m trying to create behavior change with a complex person here. I’m therefore having a complex array of tools can be to your benefit and your advantages as a nutrition coach or any sort of coach.
Paddy Farrell
100%. And I want to wrap this up soon because we’ve got stuff to do. Of course, there are a few different things that I do want to just mention, you know, I feel are really key and important thing is for coaches, regardless, nutrition training, whatever the key things that people should know in the first one is you should know when to refer it.
Paddy Farrell
You know, if somebody comes to me and they have had catastrophic injuries, like I might be able to change their resistance training program, for example, to be more adaptive. I train, I’ve trained people with, you know, various issues before, but I’m probably going to go, you know what, Gary? You’re actually a better fit and this is why we have a multidisciplinary team.
Paddy Farrell
But if it’s something else, a nutrition thing, like some of those, again, some sort of really disordered eating patterns, like Brian, I’m going to refer them to you because I know you’ll be able to help them more than I’ll be able to help them, right? So you need to know when to repair eggs and you should build a strong referral network.
Paddy Farrell
And we’ve done that a lot with the team that we’ve built. But if you don’t have a team, you should still know people. Either it’s you online or in your local area or whatever that you can refer people out. Like you simply can’t be an expert in absolutely everything, you know, and following on from that, you should know when to say no to working with someone, right?
Paddy Farrell
If someone comes to you, you’re going to get inquiries, going to get you going, Oh, can you help me with X, Y or Z? And while yeah, it can be fine, can work out fine like you actually do yourself and that person a disservice by giving them a shittier service and they could have gone elsewhere. Right. And if you can actually go, okay, yeah, I can kind of help.
Paddy Farrell
I can, you know, maybe I can get 50% of your way towards your goal, whereas, you know, there’s someone else out there and I could get them 100% of the way to their goal in whatever timeframe, like you’ve now given them like 50% shooting or service and that other person could have given them. Right. And yet you might be thinking, Well, I need the money, I need to, you know, get whatever.
Paddy Farrell
And there is a degree of that and there’s no way around that unless I see I’m not money.
Gary McGowan
And bought.
Paddy Farrell
You actually create a better service long term and you create a more model call them like a loyal following loyal customers because they know you’re only taking them on if you can 100% help them. And obviously, again, it’s a privileged position to be in to be able to say, No, sorry, I can’t work with you, I can’t help you with your goals.
Paddy Farrell
And but if you can get to the place, you’re actually going to create a much better service overall. Which brings me to the final point, which is one of the things that coaches regularly fall down on is their overall marketability. They’re not actually doing the things they need to do to market their services effectively. Right? And you might think, Oh, well, you know, I do want to play the marketing game that’s all like sleazy and it’s all whatever.
Paddy Farrell
But very often you will see that if you don’t market to these people, if you don’t market to people that are interested in nutrition coaching or whatever, they’re just going to go elsewhere and they’re potentially going to get a shitty service, they’re potentially going to be exposed, you know, crappy protocol systems, whatever. So you’re actually doing them a disservice by not marketing the fact that you provide services that are actually good.
Paddy Farrell
Right? And again, you see this all the time where coaches are just like, No, I don’t. I’m above that marketing stuff. I’m not going to do it because the quality of my product should speak for itself, right? And that would be phenomenal if it was true. Yeah, right. But unfortunately it’s not right. You’re going to have to play the marketing game now.
Paddy Farrell
It doesn’t have be sleazy because people kind of have this bad taste in their marriage about marketing. But it does have to be effective in terms of getting your message out, which could be, again, a very specific message. But you have to play the marketing game because if you don’t pay the marketing game, you’re going to be a good coach.
Paddy Farrell
You’re going to be three years into your career because I think it’s coaching is like, where’s that life of my phone, which is like 2 to 5 years is the average. Yes, you’re going to be three years into the game and you’re going to go, there’s just not enough money in there. I really enjoy helping people. I’ve really got a lot of knowledge around nutrition or training or whatever, but I just don’t have the client base to be able to help people.
Paddy Farrell
So I have to close up shop and I’m going to have to get a job, which I’m not as passionate about or whatever, which you could have solved if you actually played the marketing game. You guys being asked to add or do you to talk about that marketing. Otherwise Gary is going to wrap this up.
Gary McGowan
Go on us.
Brian
I was just going to say that as well as people thinking like there are those that still you also get people who are kind of afraid to market themselves, you know, people that are newer in the industry having imposter syndrome and things like that, and afraid to put put material out. And I mentioned this earlier that, you know, you’re putting material out not to impress the likes of awesome, right?
Brian
You’re putting it out to try and help the people. You’re trying to help, right? So, yeah, you you need to get started. And, you know, naturally, if you’re only getting started, you have very little experience and you can only develop that by actually working with people. Right. And then, you know, to your point about knowing when to refer out, I think I think as you’re developing as a coach, like you’ll always be working with people that. Push you, you know, to get.
Brian
Back to your comfort zone. Right? So we like throughout my coaching career, you know, I’ll go through phases like when I first started coaching people on this disordered eating, stuff like that was outside of my comfort zone a little bit, but it wasn’t too far. It wasn’t so far out that, you know, I was given a bad service, like you said, or potentially harming people.
Brian
But it was enough that it was going to push me to. Stretch in your knowledge. Okay. Need to actually sit down and study a bit more about this specific time to be able to help this person.
Brian
And that will always happen like you always have the first time. And yet someone with like the comic memory and then you’re got to figure out how to deal with that for you. You know, the first time well, I was able to do a complex thing, but not necessarily going to like, Oh yeah, that’s fine. But, you know, there’s there’s lots of those kinds of examples that he’s going to have to go.
Brian
Are PCOS, for example, if to go find and learn how to actually deal with that, you know, and that only happened because of how the client does.
Paddy Farrell
Effectively you don’t know what you don’t know. So you kind of have to be exposed to it before you can know to look for what to actually study and expand.
Brian
And, you know, we coach a lot of coaches right in our right right now on our rosters in the past, in the future, I’m sure. So that can be a nice kind of sort of safety zone to have is where you know because a lot of my clients who are coaches like Dell, they’ll discuss clients cases with me and they want to make sure.
Paddy Farrell
That be a mentorship.
Brian
Yeah, thankfully. So they’re getting mentorship and coaching all rolled into one. They can get enrolled on the nutrition certificate and then really redevelop their knowledge. So those are kind of the ways you can do this without feeling like you’re, you know, treading water in the middle of the ocean.
Paddy Farrell
In the present.
Dean
Yeah. And I was just as an agreement with everything Brian said, and we kind of mirrored a lot of what I was going to say about before I started specifically with people’s nutrition. I was powerful training for. And I feel like that is a deficit and a lot of person training courses is the communication coaching psychology, definitely, but also the sales and marketing, you know, and that’s obviously why there’s such a high churn rate with coaches and personal trainers is because there there’s nothing ready to to give them that skill.
Dean
And then obviously you have the whole thing of as as you’re saying, some people are just a little bit afraid to do that. But, you know, if if you have that fear, you’re never going to be able to help people. You’re never actually going to be able to open the forum for for you to actually help people, you know, And provided that you’re not promising the moon and the stars and, you know, and your service is totally discordant with what you’re actually telling people that you’re going to deliver them and, it’s absolutely fine.
Dean
And that it shouldn’t be like there shouldn’t be any sort of moral quandary to deal with there with regards to, you know, have some reservations about the kids. Whereas like other people, as you were saying earlier, now some people are just like they just see people as close to them as you know, and it’s just like, yeah, like, you know, even like a lot of like Gary has probably a few opinions on chiropractors, but one thing that comes to mind with chiropractors is not all of them now, but a lot of them, they’re get in and that’s like right for the next 20 weeks you’re going to be coming in to me twice a week
Dean
and I’m going to get your real name and all this kind of stuff. And it’s just like, you know, you’re just taking people for, you know, you’re taking taking them for a run or like, you know, So I think if you are confident in your abilities and your general demeanor is I want to help people, I love helping people.
Dean
You know, the aspect of the job, like, you know, really sort of like the fire in my belly. And then you should that should actually be a motivating factor for you to sell your wares. It’s actually because that’s what’s going to get you in front of the people that you’re going to be able to to help eventually. You know, and I think if you’re if you’re a well-put-together individual, you’re not a psychopath.
Dean
And that’s, you know, just see dollar signs all over the place and.
Gary McGowan
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. And then urology.
Brian
So, yeah.
Paddy Farrell
Check it out. Gary, wrap it up.
Gary McGowan
That brings this to a close, obviously of relevance to this podcast episode is our nutrition certificate and that will be closing in a month’s time. So this has been the first release of the nutrition service. This is kind of our volume one. We’re making some updates in the interim. So if you’d like to get on that course before it closes down, make sure to subscribe within the next month a.S.A.P.
Gary McGowan
Would you also have coaching spaces available? Includes our full coaching service and our nutrition only coaching service? So if you’d like the benefits of high quality nutrition coaching and a little bit of mentorship the way as we’ve said, you can get involved in the description box below, we also have a lot of free information that we put out on our social media tries method on our newsletter, The Trash Method newsletter, and of course here on the podcast.
Gary McGowan
So if you enjoy all of that, make sure to see back to us life, common, subscribe, all that sort of stuff and we’ll see you in the next episode of the podcast. Bye.
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