Learn Food Coaching
Learn to
- help people understand dietary problems
- find a more appropriate and healthier way to eat
- motivate clients to adopt positive changes in their dietary habits
A 100 hour, self paced, online course.
As a food coach you will talk in general terms about diets and nutrition. For example, you can encourage your clients to make healthy food choices e.g. favouring lean meat and eating plenty of vegetables with their meals. You can educate them about different aspects of nutrition e.g. which fats are best to eat. You can also advise them to drink sufficient water each day. If you are going to talk about nutrition then you should be knowledgeable about nutrition, and you should keep up to date with different types of diets and their benefits or shortfalls.
Rather than diagnosing, prescribing or recommending - your role is one of sharing information and practical advice about what a client could do to live a healthy life; and helping to motivate and plan a better for better eating.
Course Structure
This course is broken down into the following ten lessons:
- Introduction and the Healthy Diet
- Professional Standards for Food Coaching
- Specialist Diets -Chronic Conditions
- Specialist Diets - Overeating
- Specialist Diets -Poor Nutritional Diets
- Food Coaching with Children
- Food Coaching with Adults and Seniors
- Lifestyle Changes
- Moving on
- Managing your Food Coaching Service
Course Duration: 100 hours
It's Not Just About Knowing What to Eat
A food coach must obviously have some knowledge and understanding of food and nutrition; but this is a job that involves more than just that. This course will raise your awareness of food an nutrition issues; but it is equally concerned with developing your ability to appropriately communicate and interact with clients in a professional way. Issues such as communication skills, client psychology, ethics and law are all just as important.
Consider How You Make Ethical Decisions
There are a number of points to be taken into consideration when attempting to make an ethical decision. The following guideline can be of help.
- What is the problem? Seek out as much information as possible to define the problem e.g. is it ethical, legal, moral, professional, and so on?
- What are the issues involved? Work out the rights and responsibilities of those involved.
- Check the ethical guidelines and how your own views compare with these.
- Check the relevant laws to ensure that they do not conflict with the ethical decision.
- Consult with other professionals who are knowledgeable in the area of concern.
- Brainstorm over possible courses of action and include the client in the process.
- Consider the options and consequences of taking each one and discuss with the client.
- Choose the best course of action and follow up to ensure that no further action is necessary.
As far as is possible, include the client during each step of the ethical decision-making process.
Legal Concerns
Just like other professionals, coaches must act within the law. Laws are made to protect all members of society. They are formed from personal and professional values and ethics. Generally, laws are made when there are repeated violations of people's well being and they act to prevent similar violations from reoccurring. As a coach you should familiarise yourself with any laws which relate to offering a service to clients.
WHY MIGHT YOU DO THIS COURSE?
- To compliment related knowledge and/or experience, prior to establishing a business as a life coach
- Life coaches may do this to better understand how they can help their clients with respect to eating habits
- Fitness professionals may use this to broaden the scope of services they may offer clients
- Carers or health professionals seeking to fill a gap in their knowledge and broaden the scope of support they can offer to people they already work with
- Health food shop staff seeking to be more capable of offering advice to customers.
- Students of nutrition seeking to broaden their employment possibilities.
