Eating Habit Coach for Career Women

An eating habit coach is someone who helps you create healthier eating habits, by working on the system of the brain involved in habit formation.

This is different than a nutritionist, dietitian, health coach, and even healthcare provider. (I know, because I was a healthcare provider for 15 years.)

These experts advise what specific foods, food categories, and portion sizes are best suited for you and your physical health, which is a great first step, but it stops there for most.

An eating habit coach takes you through the rest of the steps necessary by helping you to make these healthier foods your “go-to” foods, or the foods you eat out of habit.

This is the tough part for many, but especially career women, for various reasons.

So, if you’re a career woman struggling with bad eating habits, then I’d like to share with you 5 of the principle reasons why having an eating habit coach is exactly what you need.

Eating Habit Coaching Addresses the Real Problem

How many times have you read or were told what foods you should be eating and what foods you shouldn’t be eating?

Meaning, which foods are healthy and which are not.

From blog posts to articles from big sites like Healthline to podcasts, media outlets, government agencies, coaches, experts, doctors, you name it.

They all have excellent intentions, to give you awareness of what you may want to eat and what you may want to avoid if you want to improve your health, but awareness alone isn’t enough.

Most people are aware that vegetables, fruit, lean protein, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and beans are healthy, whereas fast food, donuts, and candy is not.

So if we are all aware of what is healthy and what isn’t, and we want to be healthy, why don’t we just eat those healthy foods 99% of the time? And why don’t we eat the foods we know are unhealthy, only very occasionally?

Because the real problem isn’t knowing what foods are good for you, it’s knowing how to actually choose the healthier foods over the unhealthy foods routinely and without much mental effort or “mental chatter.”

It’s also knowing how to break unhealthy eating habits when you want to.

• Related: How to Form Habits to Make Your Life Easier
• GET WEEKLY TIPS: Eating Habit and Weight Loss Tips

That’s where eating habit coaching comes in. It addresses the “how” instead of just the “what.”

Knowing what healthy eating habits are, is not very useful unless you know how to change your behavior, or start eating more healthy foods in place of the unhealthy foods.

Then, you need to know how to take that new behavior and effectively create a habit of choosing the healthier option or portion-size. So when the temptations arise, you don’t automatically act on them, especially when you know the negative outcomes in the short- and long-term.

This is what an eating habit coach helps you with.

Eating habit coaching helps you to essentially “rewire” your brain so that the healthier choices are on autopilot, and so your actions align with your intentions.

That way, when you intend to eat healthier foods, you do, because it’s now habit to shop for healthier foods, prepare healthier foods, eat them, and decline the unhealthy foods more frequently than you currently do.

• Related: How To Change Your Eating Habits Forever: Your Ultimate Guide

An Eating Habit Coach Helps You Take Control

As a career woman, it feels good to have control over the things you’re able to have control over.

For example, it feels good to have control over your finances and financial decisions.

It feels good to have control over your free time, especially after you’ve worked long hours.

It even feels good to have control over what podcast you’ll listen to on your commute.

It also feels good to know you have control over what you eat (plus your food urges), especially when you start seeing the benefits of better eating habits.

• Related: How To Conquer Your Eating And Drinking Urges

Once you feel like you have some control, you’re proving to your brain that you’re able to have good eating habits. Once your brain sees this, it is more likely to keep repeating those good eating habits.

An eating habit coach helps you to get more control over your eating habits by manipulating and “rewiring” the “habit self” into letting go of the bad eating habits, in exchange for healthier eating habits.

The “habit self” is the system in your brain that is made up of multiple components and neuropathways (connections between nerve cells) that fires whenever you are acting out of habit.

The “conscious self” is the system in your brain that fires whenever you are actively making a decision. It involves more critical thinking and is much more future-focused.

Being future-focused means you are thinking about the implications in the future if you eat that second donut or not. (The second donut is just an example.)

You might think that your “conscious self” has more control, but the “habit self” tends to overpower the “conscious self,” especially when tired or stressed.

A main reason for this is because the neuropathways are very fast in the “habit self” since they have fired over and over again in your past.

When tired or stressed, your brain tends to rely on the “habit self” more, in order to conserve energy and not have to think. So, if the “habit self” is programmed to make the healthier food choices, then life is so much easier.

An Eating Habit Coach Helps You Re-frame Your Thoughts

An important component of changing your eating habits effectively is your thoughts.

Meaning, what you’ve either been telling yourself for years about your ability to change your eating habits, and what you’re making failure mean.

Thoughts strongly influence your results, so making sure your thoughts are supportive of the results you want to create is extremely important.

Said differently, you don’t want thoughts that will sabotage your results.

As humans, we tend to have cognitive errors and biases. Meaning, we tend to misinterpret our thoughts and sometimes our thoughts even follow patterns that lead us in an undesirable direction.

An eating habit coach will help you understand which cognitive errors, or thought errors are holding you back and what to do to resolve them.

It’s therefore important to not just address the action steps that are needed for eating habit change, but also address the thoughts that are getting in the way of that change.

An Eating Habit Coach for Career Women Addresses Challenges Specific to Career Women

Much of the reason why career women have developed bad eating habits and have difficulty breaking their bad eating habits, is because of the nature of being a career woman.

In general, career women have busy schedules, can work long hours, use a lot of mental energy during the day, have other people influencing their eating habits, deal with a lot of stress, just to name a few.

• Related: Best 5 Tips For a Healthier Happy Hour
• Related: How to Eat Healthy While Traveling for Work

An eating habit coach who knows career women and has experienced all of those challenges that career women face with eating habits, is the best person to help a fellow career woman with her eating habits.

There is a solution to every challenge, and in the case of eating habits, there are multiple solutions to each challenge.

An eating habit coach helps you navigate these challenges, even ones you may not have realized you were encountering. You learn tools for each specific challenge that enable you to weaken the impact of those challenges until they no longer affect your outcome.

• Related: Are You Eating Because You’re Hungry?
• Related: How to Eat Mindfully, for Busy Women

An Eating Habit Coach Shows You How to Boost Your Motivation The Right Way

Many people trying to eat healthier, either don’t know how to boost or increase their motivation, or they do it the wrong way.

Motivation is just one of the many components needed to perform an action to get a result, but it is one that you want to increase as much as you can.

You tend to start out with a lot of motivation when you first get excited about a goal. You think about how you’ll feel differently once you reach that goal, or that others will think even better thoughts about you.

• Related: 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Health Goals
• GET WEEKLY TIPS: Eating Habit and Weight Loss Tips

You may soon find that motivation dwindles as excitement dwindles.

So how do you make sure you keep doing the desired actions, (especially if they aren’t comfortable) in order to continue pushing on to reach your goal?

Having an eating habit coach to enlighten you about how motivation really works and teach you the appropriate tools to increase motivation, is going to be so valuable in reaching your goals.

Final Note

If you’re first learning how to use a computer for the very first time, choose a goal of being a computer whiz in a month, and try to do it all on your own, your experience is going to be pretty frustrating all around.

You’ll spend a lot of time not knowing what steps to take, start losing motivation, feel a lot of negative emotion, and won’t reach your goal.

Contrast that with having a computer whiz start with teaching you the basics, then more intermediate skills, then lead you to advanced computer skills in a way that your brain can handle, you’ll likely reach your goal.

That’s what having an eating habit coach is like, even for intelligent, persistent career women who are used to reaching their goals.

It’s a way for you to get from point A to point B a lot more efficiently, with less negative feelings along the way, and then being able to get from point B to C and from C to D, etc. in the future on your own.