433-How to Coach Behavior Change Without a ‘Fix’ Mindset

It’s Beyond The Food Podcast Episode 433

How do I help clients change without trying to fix them?

Help clients change by shifting from a fix-it mindset to one of understanding. Focus on their thoughts, beliefs, and emotional patterns using a trauma-informed, cognitive behavioral coaching approach. This creates lasting, sustainable behavior change without relying on quick fixes or surface-level solutions.

[00:00:00] Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food Podcast, my sisters. I’m your host, Stephanie Dosier, and today it’s going to be about habits and behavioral coaching, specifically in a weight neutral space. Many people that I work with, health professionals and coaches come from a traditional training when it comes to health, be it coaching certification, dietetic training psychotherapist training, and they are thought to approach.

[00:00:32] Health habits as something to be fixed and to be fixed quick, whatever, be it eating behavior or even things like movement. Many of us have the impulse when it comes to help promoting behavior to hurry, urgency, and then go into fix mode. It’s an impulse, almost engrave in our DNA that we [00:01:00] need to make a plan to get a result.

[00:01:02] Quick, and I see that even in people that come and work with me that are already in the weight neutral space, they have shifted. Their approach to health to be not about weight loss, not about weight, and they understand that the model of health is much broader than physical. They understand that it’s about mental health, emotional health, physical health, and also spiritual health.

[00:01:33] They get that and. They come to health promoting habit like eating or movement in that part of that client work, and they approach that portion of that coaching in the same way that they were trained, not because. They want to harm their client or cause them [00:02:00] to have temporary behavior, which by the way is the result of a very traditional approach to health promoting behavioral change.

[00:02:08] But simply because they don’t know anything else. And that’s why I say today, that is the number one mistake when we move into an approach for health habit change that is about. Solution or fixing first, if that’s the first thing we do with our client. It leads to temporary behavior change and unsustainable behavior change, which I know all of you listening to this podcast, that is not what you want for your client.

[00:02:46] But when we do the fix it approach, the jumping to the solution, that’s the outcome for the vast majority of our client. So let’s shift that today. Let’s shift [00:03:00] from solution to change in health promoting habit. To understanding, and I’m gonna unpack this word, understanding a lot deeper in the minutes to come so you can understand the difference of those two approach to behavioral change.

[00:03:22] And also implement it right away with your client. Today I’m gonna share with you our four step approach that we teach, practice, and model within the non-value coaching certification to help health habit changes.

[00:03:40] So let’s start with contextualization of what I often hear and that will help you connect this material that I’m gonna go over today. If that’s for you, if you have the feeling that sometimes when you address behavior change, it feels [00:04:00] like you keep giving advice and it goes nowhere.

[00:04:04] This is for you. If you feel stuck because when you’re in the midst, like in the thick of things with your client and you are into the habit situation, portion of this new habit, and it feels like your client is very emotional. And you don’t know what to say or how to address that emotional component.

[00:04:27] The rest of this podcast episode is for you. And if you keep asking yourself, I don’t know, am I doing this right? Because it sure doesn’t feel like it stick with me. And the reason why you have these thoughts as a coach and as a professional helping other people with their habit, it is likely because you are in what I call a archaic health coaching model, and this is very relevant for licensed health professional.

[00:04:57] When I was trained in [00:05:00] nutrition, that is almost 10 years ago. It’s very sad to say that I did not have one course on habit change or behavioral change. None. We were told to give a lot of intellectual information about why our clients should change their eating habits, overwhelm them with factual information and study and research to.

[00:05:29] Quote, prove to them that they have to change their habits. So this is what I now know as convincing. We were trying to convince people to make the change by using intellectual information, and when that didn’t work, we were there to consistently have a solution. Have a different solution. They could try, okay, this didn’t work.

[00:05:52] Try this instead. This didn’t work. Try this instead. Let’s make this little tweak over here, and maybe that’s gonna work for you. [00:06:00] Like jumping advice mode, intellectual information, and all of that is because most of our health curriculum are based and rooted in diet culture. And for most training program and schools, they don’t know that because they’re themselves, the teacher, the deans are themselves entrenched in diet culture, and most of the time.

[00:06:24] Fat phobic. So they don’t know that the curriculum they have built and displayed to their students for years past is entrenched in diet culture. And we leave those program thinking that habits, health, habits like eating, are to be controlled and managed. That innately people should eat healthy and when innately, our client don’t demonstrate that they’re the problem, the client is the problem, and we need to exert control and management of behavior, which leads us [00:07:00] to.

[00:07:00] Think it’s up to us to solve the problem. And the way to solve the problem is through intellectual information. It’s through tips and tricks and manipulation of solution until we find what actually quote, fix our client. And that’s why when I first went in for myself in the world of weight neutral health.

[00:07:24] I still approach weight neutral health promoting behavior in that same mindset because I had not learned how behavior are created in humans.

[00:07:39] So let’s talk about this. How behaviors are created in human. Our behavior is the outcome of our feelings, of how we feel about whatever area of our life we’re trying to have. A different behavior [00:08:00] in, or we’re having a behavior in. So let’s look at eating, because that’s typically the number one urgency that our client want help with when they come to us, no matter which specialty you’re in.

[00:08:16] And it may be slightly different for fitness professional where people will come to you for movement, but very quickly the narrative will come to eating. So if you are a fitness professional listening to this, play with me here and let’s talk about eating. And it’s 98% the same when it comes to movement behavior.

[00:08:38] So our eating behavior are the result of the way we feel about eating, about nutrition, about our food because of the way we think about our eating or about food. Our behavior are the result or the outcome of our emotion and our feeling because of the way we [00:09:00] think about eating or nutrition.

[00:09:02] And, this is why addressing the behavior directly, and this is what the. Archaic traditional model of health coaching tells you to do is to jump right in at the behavior level, at the eating behavior level, and solve at the behavior level, and solve the emotional eating, the binge eating, the nighttime eating, solve the behavior directly, quickly, fix it, give a ton of advice.

[00:09:36] Throw in a ton of intellectual information and that somehow magically will override how people feel about food and nutrition. It will override somehow about how people feel about movement and magically somehow produce this new behavior that they will sustain for the rest of their life. While [00:10:00] continuing to have distorted thoughts about food and movement with very intense emotion about eating and movement, do you see how that really doesn’t make sense?

[00:10:12] And this is the problem. The old fashioned health promoting behavior change with the advice and intellectual information actually leads people to feel overwhelmed with the amount of set information that the coach is trying to throw at them, and hope that’s gonna produce a different behavior. So instead of having.

[00:10:34] Five or six thoughts about their eating and their nutrition. Currently, they now have 10 to 15 or even more intense thought about how they suck and how they’re not good enough because, oh my God, look at how the science says I should be eating. I’m so broken. I can’t eat this way. And there’s a lot of resentment, a lot of shame that amplify.

[00:10:58] What is. [00:11:00] Often referred to as a self-sabotaging behavior. If you see that in your client that you work with, where if you’re starting on the eating behavior change, and the more you. Go. The longer you work on the eating behavior, the more self-sabotaging behavior or experienced by your client, it’s likely because their thoughts are amplifying their unproductive thoughts or amplifying, and that result in an amplifying level of very unproductive emotion, which leads to self sabotaging because now the nervous system is consistently.

[00:11:41] Triggered and consistently dysregulated, and they’re using food over and over in an attempt to regulate themselves because all along we intervened at the behavior level instead of starting at the [00:12:00] thought and belief level. And that’s what we do instead, when we approach a particular habit change, we do not address the behavior directly.

[00:12:14] That’s how we teach it. Inside of the non diet coaching certification, we adopt a cognitive behavioral coaching model, which is, by the way, the gold standard in behavioral change. It’s an across the board. Agreement in psychology that cognitive behavior coaching is the gold standard that we talk about.

[00:12:36] Eating, behavior, movement, behavior, or any other behavior produced by human when we wanna change it. Cognitive behavior coaching is the gold standard, and that model will have you work at your first layer of intervention. At the thought level, the first thing we do is we address. How the human [00:13:00] behavior is generated.

[00:13:01] We don’t jump to fix it. We step back once we have the goal set in with our client, if we wanna work on eating behavior first, that’s the agreement we have. We step back and we investigate the behavior. In the current way it is expressed in the. Emotional eating, binge eating, whatever you wanna call that.

[00:13:25] However, the client tells you that their behavior is felt and expressed in their life, it’s very important for us to respect our client’s way of describing their behavior. And very often the clients will call their behavior emotional eating, binge eating. Nighttime eating and we go there with them because that’s the way they’re currently experiencing it.

[00:13:48] And we unpack it. We unpack it using cognitive behavior coaching. So we investigate. And that’s step two. So step one of that model of behavior [00:14:00] change is you as the. Practitioner, the coach, is to understand how human behavior is generated and quickly explain that to your clients as we’re gonna go into this investigation mode.

[00:14:14] In step two, it’s very important that our client comes along with us. And as we’re investigating the behavior with them, we explaining to them what we’re doing. Here’s why I am gonna ask you all these question is because the current behavior you are experiencing right now starts with the way you think about the behavior, about the circumstance surrounding the behavior.

[00:14:39] So step two is investigating the environment with what I call powerful questions. So we investigate the environment of the behavior, for the sake of teaching here, I’m gonna take the circumstance of eating , having a change in eating behavior, and I’m gonna share with you [00:15:00] six.

[00:15:00] Coaching question that you could use with your client to investigate. Step two, their individual environment around eating and nutrition. So the first place we wanna go is what do they believe about the food that’s specifically involve in their eating experience? They want to change. So a classic example where we should all ask our clients, what do you believe about the food that you’re currently struggling?

[00:15:37] Having a normal eating behavior, if that’s the language a client use, Do you believe that there is better food than others? , We investigating their general thought about food, about their eating behavior, and next, once we’ve narrowed down an eating behavior or food we want to investigate what do they [00:16:00] believe about the specific eating pattern means about them.

[00:16:05] What do your clients make their eating behavior mean about them? So here’s a, classic coaching question for binge eating behavior, Remember, I’m using clients’ language here. When you binge, what do you make this mean about you? Next place we wanna go is investigating what they believe they should be doing instead of what they’re doing currently.

[00:16:32] So when they say things like, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just can’t do it right. That’s a great place to start. Being curious. Tell me more about doing it right. What is right? Describe to me what eating right would look like for you. What is your ideal way of eating that you think you should be able to emulate in your life right now?[00:17:00]

[00:17:00] Can you describe me what a perfect eating pattern or a perfect day of eating would look like for you? We wanna investigate the imaginary state that they would stop criticizing themselves for. The last piece of this investigation of the current environment. Remember when I said to you, the behavior is produced by the way people think about the behavior and how people feel about the behavior.

[00:17:34] And that’s the last piece of the investigation is investigating the emotional environment when your clients are experiencing the eating behavior in the way they don’t wanna experience anymore. So how do you feel during your quote binging experience? How do you feel after the quote binging experience?

[00:17:59] [00:18:00] Tell me how you meet yourself in these moments after you’ve ate in a way that you believe you shouldn’t be eating. How do you treat yourself? What happens in your mind? How do you quote? Punish yourself? Many clients will tell you like they’re tried to correct their behavior by quote, punishing themselves.

[00:18:24] Ask them, tell me more about your quote, punishment routine. When you are experiencing these eating behavior, what do you feel when you don’t behave the way you think you should behave? How do you deal with those emotions? How do you I don’t like to use the word process because I’m, I kind of wanna investigate their way of dealing with their emotions.

[00:18:53] So what do you feel when you are experiencing the behavior in a way that you think is not good, [00:19:00] and what do you do with those emotions? So you wanna investigate and you accumulate. For those who have coached with me, I coach with my iPad, So as I’m asking all these questions I originally said I was gonna give you six questions, but I gave you way more than that.

[00:19:16] As you ask these question and I’m listening to my clients answering those questions, I take notes, I write down the way they think, I write down the name of the emotion that they are telling me they’re feeling. And how they’re dealing with their emotion. I’m writing this all down. Why? Because step number three, I have to show my client how they’re currently creating the behavior they no longer want to have.

[00:19:51] So the first two step will take anywhere from one to two sessions. [00:20:00] Depending on many factor, depending on your client history, depending on your client’s level of self-awareness, depending on your skillset, your ability to read, your client, your ability to ask the question, the ability to control the conversation, where you need to be about emotion and thoughts,

[00:20:22] heads up because many clients are not comfortable talking about their emotion and for some client it is very difficult to even identify their thoughts. So you’re gonna have to be probing a lot of different way for them to get to the level of, what am I thinking? So that’s why I say sometimes it can take up to two session in just investigation and then you show it to them.

[00:20:48] You show them how their thoughts, their beliefs about food, about what type of eating behavior they should emulate, [00:21:00] creates the way they feel. And you name it, you say, remember when you said you felt this way and this emotion and this, and then as a way of coping with these emotions that are created by your thought, you use food.

[00:21:15] You use food to suppress these intense emotion. You use food to numb these emotion with food. Food is not the problem. It’s the way you think about the food. So this is what we call showing their cognitive behavior model. That’s why we take notes. You take notes of what they’re saying, they’re motion to identify and you show it to them.

[00:21:37] You paint the picture of why they’re displaying the behavior that they are right now. Why is this important? Because when we get the change, the eating behavior, the or the health promoting behavior, we will need to get their buy in and not addressing the behavior directly, [00:22:00] but instead addressing the way they think what they believe, emotional management, new technique to manage their emotions so that.

[00:22:12] A natural behavior can emerge, what they often call a quote, normal eating behavior. That normal eating behavior will only be able to emerge when they have an emotionally regulated body. When they have a neutral way of thinking about the food or their eating, where they’re often in, in eating behavior, they have to detach.

[00:22:38] Their own innate worth and what their behavior around eating and food means about them. We have to separate the two in order for them to feel worthy and have a great self-esteem independently of their behavior around food. And that’s step number four, That’s where most [00:23:00] of the health promoting coaching time space number of session happen is the resiliency in changing the way we think and believe about the circumstance of the behavior.

[00:23:14] And I’m just gonna go back, I touched at the beginning around fitness. If you are a movement coach, it is very similar to eating when you do a thorough investigation of the current behavior, why people don’t move, why people don’t go to the gym. If you are a gym-based personal trainer, it has nothing to do with their lack of knowing about movement.

[00:23:38] It has to do with the way they have used movement in the past. To control their body weight, to punish themselves, to have a higher perception of themselves by achieving big goals like running a marathon so I can prove that I’m a fit person. So they’ve used their thoughts around [00:24:00] movement. Around training are entangled with their self-worth, or they have used movement strictly to control their body.

[00:24:10] So they have a very quote, unhealthy relationship to movement. It’s not about their function supporting their body. It’s simply or was simply a tool to control their body, and now they wanna have a sustainable relationship to exercise for the rest of their life. You and them are gonna have to do the work at the thought and the belief level of how movement exists independently of their weight and how their bodies show up in the world.

[00:24:39] That’s the future of women coaching. That’s what we teach in the non-diet coaching certification, because changing how women interact with health requires the work and the thought and the belief level, because that’s where diet culture exists. Diet [00:25:00] culture operates at the thought and the belief level. So if we don’t go in there, as the interventionist, our client will keep their thoughts and their belief about diet cultures and bodies and what it means to be a woman in this world and with our body, and we’ll have unsustainable behavior change.

[00:25:20] They will quote, fix the behavior for six months. But then the old thoughts and belief from diet culture will resurface become bigger when they no longer coach with you. And then these thoughts and theres belief will create back the shame, the guilt type of emotion. We’ll throw them back in, quote, self-sabotaging behavior.

[00:25:44] And it will stop having the behavior because we haven’t had an intervention and the thought and the belief level. Before I close this podcast, I just wanna give you some kind of a bonus on the, what I call the secret [00:26:00] ingredients to behavior change. As you are coaching through implementation of the behavior, you wanna be sure yet you display these two special ingredient behavior change.

[00:26:16] Ought to be surrounded with compassion. Both from you as a coach to the client, As a client come into the session and they had a struggle in the last couple weeks around their behavior, how you’re meeting them, how you are modeling, how to meet a behavior that is not what we want to be, and also how the client meets themselves day to day to day.

[00:26:43] In the building of the habit that they’re wanting to change. Which leads me to the second secret ingredient, which is safety. Safety in how you show up in a relationship with a client. Is it safe for them to [00:27:00] fail? Also, Is it safe for them to struggle? Is it safe for them to be. Who they are in the moment.

[00:27:06] And them? How are they safe with themselves? Because we know as we build a behavior with any type of build up, there’s going to be ups and down. There’s gonna be. Moment where everything works good and then there’s going to be failure. There’s going to be where things are not going well. How are they meeting themselves alone?

[00:27:31] When they’re not with you in these moment, are they making it safe for them to have these down moment, these failure? Is it safe for them to be a student and learning and building a new behavior? If what I told you today resonate with you and you’re curious to learn more about this way of addressing behavior with your clients, specifically in a [00:28:00] weight neutral space.

[00:28:01] Become a specialist of behavior change. Come and join us for the next round of the non diet coaching certification, which if you’re. Listening in time will happen in October, 2025 and this is where I’m gonna teach you the trauma informed cognitive behavioral coaching model to help you and your client create sustainable lifelong health promoting habit that have nothing to do with weight, and that is a holistic whole approach to health.

[00:28:39] Including mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. Join our wait lists and then you’ll be part of our early enrollment period. This is it. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

[00:28:57] wanna coach behaviors, not [00:29:00] bodies. Learn the mindset tool and the method that create real changes.

[00:29:05] Join the wait list for the next cohort of the non diet coaching [email protected] slash waitlist. That’s where the real training begins, and I’ll see you on the other side, my sisters.