Hey pretty mamas! You all know that from the very beginning of starting this blog, it’s been my biggest goal to keep things real. I’ve been pretty open all summer about the little bit of weight that I still have to lose from having Blake and it’s been quite literally weighing on me. I’m all about body positivity and I’m not a vein person, I just want to get back to the healthiest me, where I was before. Knowing that I wanted our big theme for the fall to be self-care, I started thinking about ways that I could better take care of myself, and I finally decided to hire a health coach to be my cheerleader along the way.
I looked for someone who had a background in both fitness and nutrition because I knew I hit a wall and needed to really figure out a way to get past it. But most of all, I wanted someone who be my support and understand where I was at both emotionally and physically and help me reach my goals, catering to my lifestyle. I learned a lot and can honestly say that I’ve always thought that I could just do it all on my own, but the experience was really a game changer for me.
1. She made me more accountable.
I’m the kinda girl who will eat healthy all day long and then her husband calls on his way home from work, not wanting to eat the broiled salmon and green beans that she had planned, and picks up a pizza. I’ll go with the flow in that manner and too many cheat meals sorta cancelled out all the work I was putting in throughout the day. Meeting once a week over FaceTime and talking through my issues, having her explain anything to me able the plan I was on, and logging all my fitness and food made me super accountable. Someone was going to be reading over everything I had been doing and I wanted to get a gold star. Having a health coach kept me on my plan and helped me reach my goal.
2. I was in between two different diets and had no clue.
I would say that I’m a super healthy eater and have always been, and I thought I was on the right track – but it turned out I wasn’t. I was basically in between just a very clean eating lifestyle and doing keto and we needed to shift to one or the other to help me reach my goal of losing one last pant size. We decided to switch me to keto (which means you’ll be hearing all about it from me here!), and it’s really helped and been a diet with recipes that my whole family loves, which was really important to me.
3. I need to change my workout routine.
I had started running again two weeks before I first met with my health coach and immediately jumped back into a routine where I was running a couple times a week for distance and then doing 1-2 other quick strength training workouts during the weekdays. This was wrong for what I wanted to achieve. I stepped things up and started doing HIIT (high intensity interval training) for the most part instead. I would still do one long run with the jogging stroller throughout the week and then on weekends I would do sprints at a track near us for 20-30 minutes and then 2 other days per week did HIIT workouts in my living room for 20-30 minutes. It was what my body needed to finally start burning fat.
4. She figured out a plan that worked for me.
I know that people hear the word keto nowadays and get scared. It’s kinda like whole30 a bit (which I loved doing, too), but focuses on looking at fats versus carbs so that your body can reach a state of ketosis and burn fats instead of glucose, or carbs. It ended up being a little bit easier for me than doing whole30 and there were more dinner recipes that I could make that everyone could eat, so I wasn’t making separate meals for myself. I did it pretty strict for about a week and a half (it takes 2 days for your body to reach full ketosis since your body can only store 20g of glucose at a time) and then created a modified plan for me that worked with my lifestyle.
5. It helped me tune out the noise.
There’s so many myths and theories that everyone has about health and weight loss that it takes some sorting to know what’s what. In addition to all that noise, my husband has a tendency to think he knows everything about fitness and eating since he’s in the military and doesn’t understand how much my body has changed after having another baby. She helped me tune all of that out so that I was always field with the right information and knew what I needed to do to accomplish my goals. Sometimes, we just need that buffer.
Have you ever hired a health coach to reach a goal? What was your experience like?
Fashionably Yours,
Allison
It is good to have a coach, makes your training easier. You can do more when you have someone behind your back giving directions.