Non-Diet Health Coaching
On today’s episode, Non-Diet health coaching, we explore what helping your client with health looks like as a non-diet professional.
I answered a colleague’s question about the process of health coaching when aligned to a non-diet view on health.
What you’ll learn listening to this episode
- The true definition of health vs what you think it is
- The 4 bodies of health
- The influence of diet culture, wellness culture, and weight loss industry on healing
- What to focus on with your clients when it comes to health coaching
Mentioned in the show:
New Intake Forms – Non-Diet Client Assessment Tools
How to Teach Nutrition without co-opting diet culture webinar
Professional Training Certification Program
Sources and Quotes:
Stephanie’s articles on health
Research Health At Every Size approach
Research on weight neutral approach to health
Podcast on the failure of dieting – 286
Podcast on Wellness Culture & Healthism – 228
Podcast Health Goals versus Weight Loss Goal – 264
Podcast on weight neutral approach to health – 208
Link between body dissatisfaction and health behaviors
Episode Transcript:
UYC76-Coaching Health The Non-Diet Way
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Welcome back to the podcast my dear colleague. Today I have a very important episode to share with you today, and it was actually triggered by a question from one of, ingrid, from Sweden who sent me a question after attending our training on how to teach nutrition without co-opting diet culture. She had some very important question that I wanted to answer to her, but to all of you, because I know her question, I have been asked many times over and I wanted to record something to be able to refer people to in the future people that have the same question as you.
So I'm gonna read their email to all of you word for word of how it was sent to me. Then I'm gonna offer, it's gonna be three part, I'm gonna offer some coaching for her brain, which is probably some of you's brain if you have the same question. Then we're gonna go into teaching, like teaching factual information. And then I'm gonna take that information and see how you can apply it in your practice with your client.
So let's start with the email. Hey Stephanie. I listened to the webinar on how to teach nutrition without co-opting diet culture, but I still have a bunch of question. I'm totally with you that it's highly unhealthy to diet, but many of my client have a lot of health issue that may be the result of inflammation, thyroid condition, hyperinsulinemia, high blood pressure, and some other consequence of Metabol syndrome. In that case, the only solution apart from medical intervention that I know of is to change what they eat, at least temporarily, to let their gut and body heal. So if I start to work accordingly to your program, would I actually be able to help them improve their physical health. Or do I need to approach this from two angle, some dietary change to address their current health issue, as well as working with the mental side to give the client the confidence to continue to UNT their health? By the way, we met in person a couple years ago in Myorca.
Thank you, Ingrid. I'm gonna keep her last name confidential. So just a footnote on business, I was in Mallorca actually six and a half years ago. So I met this lady six and a half years ago. She's been on my email list since then and she now, six and a half years later, is showing interest in working with me. So I just want that to sit with you on how putting value into the world as your base philosophy of business is so powerful. I've put value into the world six and a half years ago, and it's coming back to me today in her asking question about my program. So we'll leave the business aspect of this aside and we're gonna go into giving you, Ingrid, a little bit of coaching.
So what I can see is happening in her brain as a professional is she's being introduced to the non-AI approach. I can see through the language and the sentence and the choice of words she's using, she is fairly new to this new world and her brain is seeing this new approach as a bit unsafe. It's saying, oh my God, this is all new, we've never done this before, does that mean I'm gonna be able to continue to help people be healthy? It's putting in question all of her belief system around health, because we're saying health doesn't equal weight, health doesn't equal restriction. And because it's shaking her own belief system and her belief system as a professional at the core, there is then a response from the nervous system and from the brain of catastrophizing, of seeing things in black and white, of perhaps even exaggeration. Not because she wants to catastrophize, but because her nervous system feels really unsafe.
So I'm gonna go to your brain, Ingrid, and all of you who may be in that stage of your journey as a professional. It's totally normal that you feel unsafe. As you enter the world of health, of food, of cognitive behavioral change in this brand new way, all of it is new to you. It's like I'm putting a new pair of glasses. You've been wearing these glasses for decades, and all of a sudden I rip those glasses off your face and I put a new set of glasses and you don't know how to look through life with them. You don't know how to look through your profession, through them. So I want to normalize that fear response, that insecurity that you are feeling as you are starting to put your toes into the non-AI approach. Know that if you meet yourself with awareness that this discomfort, this insecurity is normal, and you bring yourself comfort, leadership, that you are going to hold yourself, you're gonna have your back as you are learning to help your client in a different way, your nervous system will appease. Your nervous system will feel safer in this very new and unsafe environment.
I'm gonna try to hold that space for you as I'm answering this question. I'm gonna give you some intellectual information. I'm gonna give you some practical information. But no that's just a phase of discomfort that you are in. If you don't know how to coach yourself through nervous system regulation or through mindset, through cognitive behavioral coaching, this may be a sign for you to learn these things, to learn these approach in order for you to know how to create safety for yourself and comfort for yourself, and compassion for yourself, and then you can pass that wisdom on to your clients and patients.
And that's what we do. There's many podcasts on the feed that can help you with that, but that's also what our program does. It helps you with cognitive behavioral coaching, mindset and emotional regulation. Now that we've appeased the brain a little bit, let's go into more factual information around health. Because what I see in this question and what I see from many of your question when you enter this world, is I can see that your core belief around health are being disrupted. And you don't know how to think about health if it's not from a place of weight restriction, food restriction and protocol, you're like if you take that away from me as a professional, what else do I have? I just want you to know there's a whole other world of how we can help people with their health without being centric to wait, without being centric to restriction and protocol and all that wellness culture stuff.
I am not going to address in this podcast here the notion of how health and weight are not intertwined, that the layer of fat on the human body is not the cause of disease, because it's such a big topic and I need to do a very detailed job at that in order to help you deconstruct and dismantle all your fat phobic medical training or health training you've received over the years. The longer you've been in that field, the longer of an explanation it takes from me to give your brain enough new factual information in order for you to potentially change your belief system around health and weight. What I have done though, is I have listed in the show note of this podcast episode around 10 resources I have already created that exist eitheron this podcast, the going to be on the food show podcast or article that I have written over the years that are on my websites. So go to the show note and there will be a number of resources for you to look at in order to help you dismantle the belief that health is intersected with weight.
Now let's talk about health on its own. What is health? I think this is the baseline where we need to start. One of the most agreed definition of health is one from the World Health Organization, W H o, and it defines health as a state, a physical, emotional and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Another definition of health that I really like is health is a state of adaptation. Health is a some of biochemistry physical system, it's not just one system, it's the intersection of so many system in your body to adapt the environment. That's why health fluctuate true life. That's why health fluctuate through what's happening in your life, either in your relationship, in your financial situation, in where you are into the world, you will see health goes through hub and flow. For me, and the way the weight neutral approach to health sees health, it's not a defined state that one needs to achieve, but instead a series of hub and flow.
And when you're not locked in to the definition of health as a state to be achieved as a series of test resolve that needs to be at the optimum health, then it allows you for flexibility on how you approach health. Here's another way for you to think about health. Health is not something that can be achieved. We are trained and socialize in society to see everything as a standard, as a scale of one to 10 to be achieved. And we shall always aim and pursue to achieve 10 out of 10. When we take this way of looking at life and we apply it to health, health become almost competitive. Health becomes something that we judge our words and our worthiness against. There's a whole podcast in your resource in the show Note on Healthism. Healthism is very similar to fat phobia or di culture, let's go to DI culture.
Di culture is a system of belief that judges people's worth based on their weight. Healthism is a system of belief that judges people's worth based on their health, right. When we apply standard society's viewpoint that your worth is outside of you, that you're not innately worthy, that you get tangled up into this world of health being outside of you and something you have to work hard and something you have to strive to achieve when in fact, health is a state of adaptation. It's a continuum. It's a continuum requires you to be in tune with yourself in order to support your body's journey in that state of adaptation. So really, when you think about health, your question you need to ask yourself is, how can I support my body in the journey of keeping me alive and functioning to the best position or the best place available to me. Cuz here's another misunderstanding of health, is we think that all human have optimum health accessible to them. And that's not true and we'll see why that is as we go through the rest of this episode. But some of us are born with genes, perhaps defect, that leads us in a state of the HEBs and flow of life being greater or perhaps the lower portion of health are more frequented because of our, how we're built and how our body was born. And I was trapped in that for years. I was for probably a good 10 years trying to reach states of hell because I was into this healthism culture that health had to be a 10 outta 10. It was my fault if I wasn't a 10 outta 10. And it led me to spend an enormous amount of my resources, time, money, mental health and emotional health, trying to achieve something that wasn't accessible to me. Based on my genetic, based on some tissue formation in my body, that level of health on a scale of one to 10 wasn't available, but I kept pursuing it because I thought that's the only way that I'm gonna be worthy. Unpacking all of that with your client, understanding that first for you, and then two, unpacking all of that with your client is so powerful. When I found someone that was able to help me understand all of that and help me understand what true health was when it's not intersected with the weight loss industry and DI culture and wellness culture just in its pure form, it was such a revelation for me. That's something all of you can do for your clients.
So the understanding of health is critical. The other piece to understand is we cannot hate ourselves to better health status, whatever that means. Like we're gonna forget the scale of one to 10, just better health. However, when we approach health from the diet culture paradigm, then we come to health and we're like, okay, we have to work hard. We have to restrict, we have to be tough on ourselves in order for us to access better health. What it says is that you did something wrong to be at that lower health status, at that more challenging health status. You are wrong. You did something wrong to be there because Optimum Health is accessible to you. This is the same line of thinking as diet culture, right. That culture comes in and says everybody can be thin. Everybody has it within them to have a thin version of themselves. You just gotta work hard. You gotta restrict. No pain, no gain when you exercise. You're just not hard working enough in all these things to reveal the 10 version of yourself. When we don't clean up our thinking and our belief system, we come to health and we do the exact same thing. We are trying to reveal this healthier version of ourselves by working harder, by restricting more, by hating ourselves even more. And weight is a huge part to play in that, not necessarily weight in the body scale, but weight in relationship to our body image or body dissatisfaction. This is where if your clientele, your patients are women, people identified as women, they've been socialized as women, they've been under the influence of patriarchy and fat phobia and di culture, you have to explore with them their body image. Cuz I guarantee you for nine out of 10 clients, their body dissatisfaction plays a role and their current healths.
There's a study that I've linked in the show note that is from actually the Journal of Obesity, right? A 2013 study that found no link between the actual body weight and the way women feel or felt about themselves. Meaning that no matter where the their body was big or thinner,it wasn't relational to how they felt. So there was as many women who didn't like their body when they were thin, and the same ratio when women in larger body. Yet the finding of that study showed a link between how women feel about themselves, independent of their weight, how women feel about themselves and the health promoting behavior they engage in. The way women feel about their body impacts how they engage with their health. Isn't it profound? So if you help your client improve their body image, become body neutral, that's the first step. Can we just all be body neutral and liberate ourselves from dissatisfaction and body hatred, then our mental and emotional resources can be spanned on creating new health promoting behavior. That is part of helping our client achieve better health for what is accessible to them. This is what we call weight neutral health, an approach to health that is not intertwined with weight. But I'm gonna say more than just weight neutral, an approach to health that is not rooted in di culture and wellness culture whereby there's an optimum state that we can reach and we just gotta work hard and restrict and punish to get there. What is known in science as weight neutral approach to health, when we take off any conversation around body weight, B m I and we approach all other element that can impact health, that approach of weight neutral approach to health has resulted in decreased body dissatisfaction, obviously, right? We improve our body image when we neutralize our body image. Decreased disordered eating, decreased depression, increased sustainable health behavior, enjoyable self-care, sustainable self-care for long period. That particular study that I'm talking about, which is in the show note is two year study. That is so rare that we have behavioral study around health that are under a two year span. Because we know a weight neutral approach to health is fundamentally shifting the individual so the study led by Dr. Linda Bacon, who wrote the book Health at Every Size, looked at people for two year period and found tremendous change in people. And that is the main difference with a wellness culture approach to health or a body weight centric approach to health and weight neutral approach to health is that the behavioral change are sustainable. We'll talk about that on application with the client.
So for you as a practitioner is continuing, for Ingrid, continuing researching, reading books and understanding that your current viewpoint of health was formed, was created via the philosophy, via the belief system of Dia culture, wellness, culture, and fatphobia. So it's totally normal that a new way of looking and thinking at health comes in a kind of a clash with what you currently holding in your brain and into your body. So continuing your education, continuing to deepen your understanding of health without these paradigm, understanding nutrition without the paradigm of wellness culture, understanding nutrition without the paradigm of fat phobia. And for most practitioner, we have to start and teaching them the basic of behavioral modification.
What fascinates me now that I know what I know is that nearly all the training program I've encountered either personally or had student in my program coming from them, that it is college education, university education, master, have had the pleasure of teachingto dietician with master degree. I even had the pleasure of teaching to a PhD. And none of those people, the all health centric educational degree, none of them had received any training in behavioral modification. Even I have not yet encountered a health coaching training program that teaches student the future of Health Coach, C B T, cognitive behavioral modification, and how to apply C B T in a coaching centric container and how to help client from what we know is the most effective methodology to change behavior. Yet they're out there teaching health promoting behavior, but they have no framework to understand how to help their client modify their behavior.
So that would be another thing that we need to bring on as a professional, a clear understanding of behavior modification using cognitive behavioral coaching or therapy, depending if you're professional. And this is so essential if you work with women. I'm a specialist of female, self-identified women, transformation, and I'm sure if you were to talk to my counterpart who specialize in men behavioral modification, they will tell you the same thing. The vast majority of the behavioral challenges that our client have are rooted in very gender centric belief system, like in our case for women, patriarchy. DI culture with like nearly all the clients have body image struggle that impacts their health behavior. Women don't see themselves as the owner of their body. They're always looking outside of them for the guru, for the expert to tell them what to do. Part of our work in a non-AI way is to bring back the in our client, to help them trust themselves and trust their body so they can be the authority over their body and their health for the rest of their life and stop seeking outside of them all the time. And that's a direct consequence of patriarchy.
We need to be able to coach at that level. If we wanna impact the behavior permanently, sustainably, for the rest of their life, I always say to my client, my professional, your job is to work yourself out of a job. You shouldn't be working with a client for five years, cuz that means you're not doing your job. You're not teaching them how to be self su. That's our job, and for that we need to coach at the belief in the system of oppression, the culture and patriarchy level. We need to help our client understand why they have the behavior they have today, so that they know how to change it going forward. Do the work on yourself first two, then take what you've now know and teach it in a simpler, more consumable way to your client. And we all should start with health. It's your role in your relationship to your client to dispel the misconception of what health is and what health is not.
I, I'm very open.I had a short clinical experience. I had three years in clinical practice, but I can tell you at every single one of my patients had a belief that their weight was the cause of their health issue and that what they ate gave them or created the health issue they had. It was just a fact for them. Back in those days, I didn't know what I know today, but now when I work with people and all my program are built with starting at that point, what is health and what it is not. And furthermore than this, health is more than physical. I have not yet talked about that yet, but this very linear approach to health, that health is only physical, is laughable. But it serves the purpose of the weight loss industry in DI culture to only focus on the body, on the physical body. I mean, that's the whole purpose of the weight loss industry, right? That's the focus on the physical body. And the same thing for DI culture, and almost the same thing for wellness culture as, right. All the product and the supplements and the protocol and the books all aim at changing physical health. You know what? Remember the World Health Organization definition of health, health is way more than just physical. It's your mental health, it's your emotional health, it's your spiritual health. And yes, it's physical, but not in the notion that we're sold where the physical health equals weight and which you eats. That's our job. You as a health advisor, whatever your role is, therapists, nurses, health coach, dietician, your job is to focus your health approach on mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. You have to broaden the lands in your approach to include all of it. But yet, and I know as I'm saying that, you're like, but I'm not trained. I only know how to create food protocol. I hear you. That's a problematic in our industry that we're trying to solve in my company. But you need to get trained on mental health and emotional health. You need to be able to help your client regulate their emotion and manage their thoughts and change their beliefs, change their behavior. Cognitive behavioral coaching is our solution to that.
The second or the third thing we need to do, we need to work on our own knowledge. We need to teach our client what health is and what it's not, and then we need to validate or help them create an intention on working with their health from a place of love and not fear. I talked about that on how that culture and weight loss culture is all centric on punishment and restriction and harder and, like all that punishment and like no pain, no gain mindset, we need to walk away from that. We need to think about our health from a place of love, not fear in restriction and no pain, no gain and punishment is fear.
And don't kid yourself. The protocol that Ingrid was talking about in her email, the restrictive protocol, that's fear-based. That's with the understanding that the individual, your client does not know how to feed themselves, that they must be controlled, that authority outside of them must come in and tell them what to eat, when to eat it, how much to eat it, that they don't have disability for themself. It's denying the individual and their authority over the. Our approach needs to be from a place of love. How can they love themselves more? How can we offer the body more support instead of restricting it? What is very interesting when you get deeper into this approach is that restriction protocol, restrictive protocol creates stress, massive amount of surf, like telling your client that they need to eliminate all these foods and they need to eat this way. They come back home and they're stressed. How are they going to do that in a life that's already too busy? And yet, we know that stress is recognized as one of the most powerful agent towards insulin inflammation, towards chronic health condition. And yet our approach causes more stress.
The fact that our client hate their physical body because they think of themselves as too old, too big, causes stress, which causes inflammation. We know that from science, and we don't make one plus one in our approach. Our body isn't broken and your client's body isn't broken. That's not why they're unhealthy. They're quote unquote unhealthy, they're currently sick because the head and flow of their health, that is the best way right now with everything coming at them. And that's should be done through your assessment of them, like all the things coming at them mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, the best way their body has found to survive that was through the disease pathway or the inflammation pathway. Throwing more stuff at them is not solving the problem. The problem is helping them defer everything that's coming at them. That's why we call, we finally came to the conclusion that the work in the non-AI approach was life coaching. It's a branch of life coaching, but that's what we do. We help our client navigate through life, so there's less causes of distress for them and then we let the body do its magic. Cuz the body knows how to, like the heaven flow of health, the body knows. But we help them like eliminate the things in their life that causes this, the distress, that the body, the best way of dealing with it is through the pathway of inflammation of disease. And most of the people that I work with are not doctors or physicians. We need to stay within our lanes. Most of us have no qualification or shouldn't be messing up with quote unquote treatments of people. That's the job of physician and doctor and specialists. Our impact, and I'm tapping on my chest right now if you heard that, our role is behavioral, health promoting behavioral coaching, going out there with our client and trying to set up an environment where they can engage in health promoting behavior, but not taking the role of a physician with supplements and treatments and protocol and all of that. That's not our role.
So how do we approach health then? One of our number one goals should be to reduce stress, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And restriction causes more stress so no, there's no restriction. Give more, figure out with your client how they can give themselves more, how they can love themselves more. And I can tell you from experience when you're trying to help a client engage in health promoting behavior from a place of love, a lot of the work is in their minds, the quality of their thoughts. Just like mine were 10 years ago, it's like, oh yeah, yay, yay, yay, we gotta go in there and help them clean up the way they think about themselves, about their body, about health. So if you know anything about cognitive behavior coaching or behavioral modification, your thoughts creates your feeling, your feeling then creates your habits. So when you help your client clean up what's happening in their brain, you then make them relieve in their emotion, and then they can have productive health promoting behavior. So yeah, Ingrid, it's a twofold, then I wanna say a fourfold approach. Mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. And the physical one is not about giving them more to do, it's actually prioritizing the little bits and then cleaning up so there's more space and resources for them to do more in the future. We have an expert in our program, her name is Bet Rosen, she's a clinical dietician specializing in gut health. That's all she does from a health at every size and intuitive eating approach, and her protocol is only six weeks. Six weeks, that's it. And she only gets client to the protocol of gut health, whatever she does, once they first onboarded the basic of intuitive eating, that they eat when they're hungry, fullness and satisfaction, and there's no food rules, like she cleans all that up first. Once the client is at a state where they're eating peacefully, then they engage into a only six weeks protocol. And the goal of the protocol is to eat more diverse food, it's not to find a list of food to restrict. She teaches a class in our program, and she's one of our referral practitioner because most of us don't have the qualification to do that or the specialty to do that. So we do all the basic work with our client and then we refer to her for gut health specific condition that were diagnosed. And then she intervenes with a very short protocol, just to show you the difference between what most health certification and functional health train you to do versus what is actually needed. It's phenomenal, the difference between the two.
The other thing that I haven't talked about yet, but I wanna make sure that we cover here, it's also in the show note, that's called the Social Determinant of Health. What affects health in an individual versus what we are taught versus the truth is vastly different. I'm only gonna state one number for the purpose of this episode because it's already long, but food and physical movement, fitness, only accounts for 17, one 7% of what actually impacts one's health. Isn't that bite blowing? It's called the social determinant of health. You have the link in the show note, but I'm just gonna quote you other number. 7% of what an individual impacts their health is the environment, like the quality of hair. Access to medical care, 11% of what contributes to one's health. Genetic 22%. And then here's the banger, 24% of what impacts an individual's health is social circumstance, like foods scarcity, people not having enough to eat, or people voluntarily not giving themselves enough to eat.
Think about that for a moment. Social connectness, education level, gender identity, sexual identity, that has a bigger impact on one's health than actual the food they choose to put in their mouth. But the problem is we are never shown these statistics because we're shown statistic, we're since statistic that support the weight loss industry, that support diet culture, and that support wellness culture. Statistic that support a weight neutral approach to health in a fat phobic society or hidden, discarded, and not made public. It's important for you to look at these research and these statistics and then talking about it with your clients so they put in perspective what really can improve their health. If I can say one thing when it comes to helping client, when it comes to their health, it's shifting to this philosophy of self-care. You know, I was talking about approaching health from a place of love instead of fear. The way we teach you how to approach health is from a place of self care. There's a list we give all our student of a hundred things between mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health they can teach their client to do that has nothing to do with restricting food or losing any weight. And soft coaching and therapy is a huge part of that. Emotional regulation, right, is another big piece of that. These are things you can do to help your client improve their health, and it's gonna have ripple effect, not just with their help but with everything else in their life. Again, why we chose to call the certification, we're gonna be launching soon life coaching cuz it's beyond the food. So this is how you can help your client in a non-AI approach to health.
So I'm gonna go back to the question that Ingrid was asking, cuz I've been talking now, I don't know how long, but it seems very long to me. I wanna make sure I answered all the question. So she talks about Metabol syndrome. I'm not gonna go into the depth of that, but metabolite syndrome is a term most often co-opted by fat phobic medical approach. So, I would really question where this Metabol syndrome belief system is coming from for you and how intertwined it is with weight. Typically that's what it is. It's intertwined with having to lose weight to some degree. There's many other reason why an individual could have high blood pressure or hyperinsulinemia, a lot of it to do with stress. And same thing with inflammation, right? There's many other reason than just the Metabol syndrome, but most often individual are trained to associate that right away with Metabol Syndrome because that support a weight centric approach to health, a k a. Reduction of weight.
You're talking about letting the gut heal. There is no sustainable evidence that the gut needs to be healed or the gut needs to have a restricted approach to food to be healed. That's wellness culture. That's just myths supporting wellness cultures and protocols and philosophy of eating and supplements, and that supports the industry of wellness culture. When you go to pure scientific evidence, there's nothing of that. So, yeah, when you look at a non diet approach to health, you won't be focused on quote unquote gut health, cuz you'll be much more worried about mental health and the quality of thoughts and their acceptance of their body that you will be worried about doing a 12 week protocol to quote unquote reduce the inflammation in their guts. That is true. That is something that we don't practice in the non-AI approach to health.
So if I started to work accordingly to your program, would I actually be able to help them improve their physical health? I just wanna look at the undertone of that question. Will your client be able to learn how to improve their health? That's the thing, like in a non-AI approach, we look at the empowerment of the client. The client creates the result, not us. We're not in that guru, I create the result for my client because I have a wisdom that they don't have. How can I enable them to access health promoting behavior that will help them in their current health status? Yeah, you will. If you can't help them regulate just their emotion, the first thing that comes to mind is you can help them regulate their emotion, like their health's gonna improve phenomenally rapidly, because that's probably a huge part of the reason why they're struggling with their health is they're overwhelmed with their emotion and they're having physical symptoms from the overload of emotion in their. So, yeah, you'll be able to help them improve their physical health, physical health right away.
Do I need to approach this from two angle, dietary change and mental health? Well, I wanna say you will learn how to approach that from four angle. Mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical, right? The four bodies of health. So, I would love to hear from you. You're still with me at the end of this podcast episode here, and maybe I've left some gap in my explanation, perhaps I forgot to talk about something, or perhaps you're listening to that and something else is being triggered, please shoot me an [email protected]. Go to the show note, click the resources. If you're new to the world of the non-AI approach, click the resources, read this stuff, listen to the podcast, and then come back and ask me more question, and I will create another podcast episode, or perhaps I will see you in our training program. With that in mind, I love you and I'll see you on the next podcast.
UYC76-Coaching Health The Non-Diet Way
Welcome back to the podcast my dear colleague. Today I have a very important episode to share with you today, and it was actually triggered by a question from one of, ingrid, from Sweden who sent me a question after attending our training on how to teach nutrition without co-opting diet culture. She had some very important question that I wanted to answer to her, but to all of you, because I know her question, I have been asked many times over and I wanted to record something to be able to refer people to in the future people that have the same question as you.
So I’m gonna read their email to all of you word for word of how it was sent to me. Then I’m gonna offer, it’s gonna be three part, I’m gonna offer some coaching for her brain, which is probably some of you’s brain if you have the same question. Then we’re gonna go into teaching, like teaching factual information. And then I’m gonna take that information and see how you can apply it in your practice with your client.
So let’s start with the email. Hey Stephanie. I listened to the webinar on how to teach nutrition without co-opting diet culture, but I still have a bunch of question. I’m totally with you that it’s highly unhealthy to diet, but many of my client have a lot of health issue that may be the result of inflammation, thyroid condition, hyperinsulinemia, high blood pressure, and some other consequence of Metabol syndrome. In that case, the only solution apart from medical intervention that I know of is to change what they eat, at least temporarily, to let their gut and body heal. So if I start to work accordingly to your program, would I actually be able to help them improve their physical health. Or do I need to approach this from two angle, some dietary change to address their current health issue, as well as working with the mental side to give the client the confidence to continue to UNT their health? By the way, we met in person a couple years ago in Myorca.
Thank you, Ingrid. I’m gonna keep her last name confidential. So just a footnote on business, I was in Mallorca actually six and a half years ago. So I met this lady six and a half years ago. She’s been on my email list since then and she now, six and a half years later, is showing interest in working with me. So I just want that to sit with you on how putting value into the world as your base philosophy of business is so powerful. I’ve put value into the world six and a half years ago, and it’s coming back to me today in her asking question about my program. So we’ll leave the business aspect of this aside and we’re gonna go into giving you, Ingrid, a little bit of coaching.
So what I can see is happening in her brain as a professional is she’s being introduced to the non-AI approach. I can see through the language and the sentence and the choice of words she’s using, she is fairly new to this new world and her brain is seeing this new approach as a bit unsafe. It’s saying, oh my God, this is all new, we’ve never done this before, does that mean I’m gonna be able to continue to help people be healthy? It’s putting in question all of her belief system around health, because we’re saying health doesn’t equal weight, health doesn’t equal restriction. And because it’s shaking her own belief system and her belief system as a professional at the core, there is then a response from the nervous system and from the brain of catastrophizing, of seeing things in black and white, of perhaps even exaggeration. Not because she wants to catastrophize, but because her nervous system feels really unsafe.
So I’m gonna go to your brain, Ingrid, and all of you who may be in that stage of your journey as a professional. It’s totally normal that you feel unsafe. As you enter the world of health, of food, of cognitive behavioral change in this brand new way, all of it is new to you. It’s like I’m putting a new pair of glasses. You’ve been wearing these glasses for decades, and all of a sudden I rip those glasses off your face and I put a new set of glasses and you don’t know how to look through life with them. You don’t know how to look through your profession, through them. So I want to normalize that fear response, that insecurity that you are feeling as you are starting to put your toes into the non-AI approach. Know that if you meet yourself with awareness that this discomfort, this insecurity is normal, and you bring yourself comfort, leadership, that you are going to hold yourself, you’re gonna have your back as you are learning to help your client in a different way, your nervous system will appease. Your nervous system will feel safer in this very new and unsafe environment.
I’m gonna try to hold that space for you as I’m answering this question. I’m gonna give you some intellectual and practical information. But no that’s just a phase of discomfort that you are in. If you don’t know how to coach yourself through nervous system regulation or through mindset, through cognitive behavioral coaching, this may be a sign for you to learn these things, to learn these approach in order for you to know how to create safety for yourself and comfort for yourself, and compassion for yourself, and then you can pass that wisdom on to your clients and patients.
And that’s what we do. There’s many podcasts on the feed that can help you with that, but that’s also what our program does. It helps you with cognitive behavioral coaching, mindset and emotional regulation. Now that we’ve appeased the brain a little bit, let’s go into more factual information around health. Because what I see in this question and what I see from many of your question when you enter this world, is I can see that your core belief around health are being disrupted. And you don’t know how to think about health if it’s not from a place of weight restriction, food restriction and protocol, you’re like if you take that away from me as a professional, what else do I have? I just want you to know there’s a whole other world of how we can help people with their health without being centric to wait, without being centric to restriction and protocol and all that wellness culture stuff.
I am not going to address in this podcast here the notion of how health and weight are not intertwined, that the layer of fat on the human body is not the cause of disease, because it’s such a big topic and I need to do a very detailed job at that in order to help you deconstruct and dismantle all your fat phobic medical training or health training you’ve received over the years. The longer you’ve been in that field, the longer of an explanation it takes from me to give your brain enough new factual information in order for you to potentially change your belief system around health and weight. What I have done though, is I have listed in the show note of this podcast episode around 10 resources I have already created that exist either on this podcast, the going to be on the food show podcast or article that I have written over the years that are on my websites. So go to the show note and there will be a number of resources for you to look at in order to help you dismantle the belief that health is intersected with weight.
Now let’s talk about health on its own. What is health? I think this is the baseline where we need to start. One of the most agreed definition of health is one from the World Health Organization, W H o, and it defines health as a state, a physical, emotional and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Another definition of health that I really like is health is a state of adaptation. Health is a some of biochemistry physical system, it’s not just one system, it’s the intersection of so many system in your body to adapt the environment. That’s why health fluctuate true life. That’s why health fluctuate through what’s happening in your life, either in your relationship, in your financial situation, in where you are into the world, you will see health goes through hub and flow. For me, and the way the weight neutral approach to health sees health, it’s not a defined state that one needs to achieve, but instead a series of hub and flow.
And when you’re not locked in to the definition of health as a state to be achieved as a series of test resolve that needs to be at the optimum health, then it allows you for flexibility on how you approach health. Here’s another way for you to think about health. Health is not something that can be achieved. We are trained and socialize in society to see everything as a standard, as a scale of one to 10 to be achieved. And we shall always aim and pursue to achieve 10 out of 10. When we take this way of looking at life and we apply it to health, health become almost competitive. Health becomes something that we judge our words and our worthiness against. There’s a whole podcast in your resource in the show Note on Healthism. Healthism is very similar to fat phobia or di culture, let’s go to DI culture.
Di culture is a system of belief that judges people’s worth based on their weight. Healthism is a system of belief that judges people’s worth based on their health, right. When we apply standard society’s viewpoint that your worth is outside of you, that you’re not innately worthy, that you get tangled up into this world of health being outside of you and something you have to work hard and something you have to strive to achieve when in fact, health is a state of adaptation. It’s a continuum. It’s a continuum requires you to be in tune with yourself in order to support your body’s journey in that state of adaptation. So really, when you think about health, your question you need to ask yourself is, how can I support my body in the journey of keeping me alive and functioning to the best position or the best place available to me. Cuz here’s another misunderstanding of health, is we think that all human have optimum health accessible to them. And that’s not true and we’ll see why that is as we go through the rest of this episode. But some of us are born with genes, perhaps defect, that leads us in a state of the HEBs and flow of life being greater or perhaps the lower portion of health are more frequented because of our, how we’re built and how our body was born. And I was trapped in that for years. I was for probably a good 10 years trying to reach states of hell because I was into this healthism culture that health had to be a 10 outta 10. It was my fault if I wasn’t a 10 outta 10. And it led me to spend an enormous amount of my resources, time, money, mental health and emotional health, trying to achieve something that wasn’t accessible to me. Based on my genetic, based on some tissue formation in my body, that level of health on a scale of one to 10 wasn’t available, but I kept pursuing it because I thought that’s the only way that I’m gonna be worthy. Unpacking all of that with your client, understanding that first for you, and then two, unpacking all of that with your client is so powerful. When I found someone that was able to help me understand all of that and help me understand what true health was when it’s not intersected with the weight loss industry and DI culture and wellness culture just in its pure form, it was such a revelation for me. That’s something all of you can do for your clients.
So the understanding of health is critical. The other piece to understand is we cannot hate ourselves to better health status, whatever that means. Like we’re gonna forget the scale of one to 10, just better health. However, when we approach health from the diet culture paradigm, then we come to health and we’re like, okay, we have to work hard. We have to restrict, we have to be tough on ourselves in order for us to access better health. What it says is that you did something wrong to be at that lower health status, at that more challenging health status. You are wrong. You did something wrong to be there because Optimum Health is accessible to you. This is the same line of thinking as diet culture, right. That culture comes in and says everybody can be thin. Everybody has it within them to have a thin version of themselves. You just gotta work hard. You gotta restrict. No pain, no gain when you exercise. You’re just not hard working enough in all these things to reveal the 10 version of yourself. When we don’t clean up our thinking and our belief system, we come to health and we do the exact same thing. We are trying to reveal this healthier version of ourselves by working harder, by restricting more, by hating ourselves even more. And weight is a huge part to play in that, not necessarily weight in the body scale, but weight in relationship to our body image or body dissatisfaction. This is where if your clientele, your patients are women, people identified as women, they’ve been socialized as women, they’ve been under the influence of patriarchy and fat phobia and di culture, you have to explore with them their body image. Cuz I guarantee you for nine out of 10 clients, their body dissatisfaction plays a role and their current healths.
There’s a study that I’ve linked in the show note that is from actually the Journal of Obesity, right? A 2013 study that found no link between the actual body weight and the way women feel or felt about themselves. Meaning that no matter where the their body was big or thinner,it wasn’t relational to how they felt. So there was as many women who didn’t like their body when they were thin, and the same ratio when women in larger body. Yet the finding of that study showed a link between how women feel about themselves, independent of their weight, how women feel about themselves and the health promoting behavior they engage in. The way women feel about their body impacts how they engage with their health. Isn’t it profound? So if you help your client improve their body image, become body neutral, that’s the first step. Can we just all be body neutral and liberate ourselves from dissatisfaction and body hatred, then our mental and emotional resources can be spanned on creating new health promoting behavior. That is part of helping our client achieve better health for what is accessible to them. This is what we call weight neutral health, an approach to health that is not intertwined with weight. But I’m gonna say more than just weight neutral, an approach to health that is not rooted in di culture and wellness culture whereby there’s an optimum state that we can reach and we just gotta work hard and restrict and punish to get there. What is known in science as weight neutral approach to health, when we take off any conversation around body weight, B m I and we approach all other element that can impact health, that approach of weight neutral approach to health has resulted in decreased body dissatisfaction, obviously, right? We improve our body image when we neutralize our body image. Decreased disordered eating, decreased depression, increased sustainable health behavior, enjoyable self-care, sustainable self-care for long period. That particular study that I’m talking about, which is in the show note is two year study. That is so rare that we have behavioral study around health that are under a two year span. Because we know a weight neutral approach to health is fundamentally shifting the individual so the study led by Dr. Linda Bacon, who wrote the book Health at Every Size, looked at people for two year period and found tremendous change in people. And that is the main difference with a wellness culture approach to health or a body weight centric approach to health and weight neutral approach to health is that the behavioral change are sustainable. We’ll talk about that on application with the client.
So for you as a practitioner is continuing, for Ingrid, continuing researching, reading books and understanding that your current viewpoint of health was formed, was created via the philosophy, via the belief system of Dia culture, wellness, culture, and fatphobia. So it’s totally normal that a new way of looking and thinking at health comes in a kind of a clash with what you currently holding in your brain and into your body. So continuing your education, continuing to deepen your understanding of health without these paradigm, understanding nutrition without the paradigm of wellness culture, understanding nutrition without the paradigm of fat phobia. And for most practitioner, we have to start and teaching them the basic of behavioral modification.
What fascinates me now that I know what I know is that nearly all the training program I’ve encountered either personally or had student in my program coming from them, that it is college education, university education, master, have had the pleasure of teachingto dietician with master degree. I even had the pleasure of teaching to a PhD. And none of those people, the all health centric educational degree, none of them had received any training in behavioral modification. Even I have not yet encountered a health coaching training program that teaches student the future of Health Coach, C B T, cognitive behavioral modification, and how to apply C B T in a coaching centric container and how to help client from what we know is the most effective methodology to change behavior. Yet they’re out there teaching health promoting behavior, but they have no framework to understand how to help their client modify their behavior.
So that would be another thing that we need to bring on as a professional, a clear understanding of behavior modification using cognitive behavioral coaching or therapy, depending if you’re professional. And this is so essential if you work with women. I’m a specialist of female, self-identified women, transformation, and I’m sure if you were to talk to my counterpart who specialize in men behavioral modification, they will tell you the same thing. The vast majority of the behavioral challenges that our client have are rooted in very gender centric belief system, like in our case for women, patriarchy. DI culture with like nearly all the clients have body image struggle that impacts their health behavior. Women don’t see themselves as the owner of their body. They’re always looking outside of them for the guru, for the expert to tell them what to do. Part of our work in a non-AI way is to bring back the in our client, to help them trust themselves and trust their body so they can be the authority over their body and their health for the rest of their life and stop seeking outside of them all the time. And that’s a direct consequence of patriarchy.
We need to be able to coach at that level. If we wanna impact the behavior permanently, sustainably, for the rest of their life, I always say to my client, my professional, your job is to work yourself out of a job. You shouldn’t be working with a client for five years, cuz that means you’re not doing your job. You’re not teaching them how to be self su. That’s our job, and for that we need to coach at the belief in the system of oppression, the culture and patriarchy level. We need to help our client understand why they have the behavior they have today, so that they know how to change it going forward. Do the work on yourself first two, then take what you’ve now know and teach it in a simpler, more consumable way to your client. And we all should start with health. It’s your role in your relationship to your client to dispel the misconception of what health is and what health is not.
I, I’m very open.I had a short clinical experience. I had three years in clinical practice, but I can tell you at every single one of my patients had a belief that their weight was the cause of their health issue and that what they ate gave them or created the health issue they had. It was just a fact for them. Back in those days, I didn’t know what I know today, but now when I work with people and all my program are built with starting at that point, what is health and what it is not. And furthermore than this, health is more than physical. I have not yet talked about that yet, but this very linear approach to health, that health is only physical, is laughable. But it serves the purpose of the weight loss industry in DI culture to only focus on the body, on the physical body. I mean, that’s the whole purpose of the weight loss industry, right? That’s the focus on the physical body. And the same thing for DI culture, and almost the same thing for wellness culture as, right. All the product and the supplements and the protocol and the books all aim at changing physical health. You know what? Remember the World Health Organization definition of health, health is way more than just physical. It’s your mental health, it’s your emotional health, it’s your spiritual health. And yes, it’s physical, but not in the notion that we’re sold where the physical health equals weight and which you eats. That’s our job. You as a health advisor, whatever your role is, therapists, nurses, health coach, dietician, your job is to focus your health approach on mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. You have to broaden the lands in your approach to include all of it. But yet, and I know as I’m saying that, you’re like, but I’m not trained. I only know how to create food protocol. I hear you. That’s a problematic in our industry that we’re trying to solve in my company. But you need to get trained on mental health and emotional health. You need to be able to help your client regulate their emotion and manage their thoughts and change their beliefs, change their behavior. Cognitive behavioral coaching is our solution to that.
The second or the third thing we need to do, we need to work on our own knowledge. We need to teach our client what health is and what it’s not, and then we need to validate or help them create an intention on working with their health from a place of love and not fear. I talked about that on how that culture and weight loss culture is all centric on punishment and restriction and harder and, like all that punishment and like no pain, no gain mindset, we need to walk away from that. We need to think about our health from a place of love, not fear in restriction and no pain, no gain and punishment is fear.
And don’t kid yourself. The protocol that Ingrid was talking about in her email, the restrictive protocol, that’s fear-based. That’s with the understanding that the individual, your client does not know how to feed themselves, that they must be controlled, that authority outside of them must come in and tell them what to eat, when to eat it, how much to eat it, that they don’t have disability for themself. It’s denying the individual and their authority over the. Our approach needs to be from a place of love. How can they love themselves more? How can we offer the body more support instead of restricting it? What is very interesting when you get deeper into this approach is that restriction protocol, restrictive protocol creates stress, massive amount of surf, like telling your client that they need to eliminate all these foods and they need to eat this way. They come back home and they’re stressed. How are they going to do that in a life that’s already too busy? And yet, we know that stress is recognized as one of the most powerful agent towards insulin inflammation, towards chronic health condition. And yet our approach causes more stress.
The fact that our client hate their physical body because they think of themselves as too old, too big, causes stress, which causes inflammation. We know that from science, and we don’t make one plus one in our approach. Our body isn’t broken and your client’s body isn’t broken. That’s not why they’re unhealthy. They’re quote unquote unhealthy, they’re currently sick because the head and flow of their health, that is the best way right now with everything coming at them. And that’s should be done through your assessment of them, like all the things coming at them mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, the best way their body has found to survive that was through the disease pathway or the inflammation pathway. Throwing more stuff at them is not solving the problem. The problem is helping them defer everything that’s coming at them. That’s why we call, we finally came to the conclusion that the work in the non-AI approach was life coaching. It’s a branch of life coaching, but that’s what we do. We help our client navigate through life, so there’s less causes of distress for them and then we let the body do its magic. Cuz the body knows how to, like the heaven flow of health, the body knows. But we help them like eliminate the things in their life that causes this, the distress, that the body, the best way of dealing with it is through the pathway of inflammation of disease. And most of the people that I work with are not doctors or physicians. We need to stay within our lanes. Most of us have no qualification or shouldn’t be messing up with quote unquote treatments of people. That’s the job of physician and doctor and specialists. Our impact, and I’m tapping on my chest right now if you heard that, our role is behavioral, health promoting behavioral coaching, going out there with our client and trying to set up an environment where they can engage in health promoting behavior, but not taking the role of a physician with supplements and treatments and protocol and all of that. That’s not our role.
So how do we approach health then? One of our number one goals should be to reduce stress, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And restriction causes more stress so no, there’s no restriction. Give more, figure out with your client how they can give themselves more, how they can love themselves more. And I can tell you from experience when you’re trying to help a client engage in health promoting behavior from a place of love, a lot of the work is in their minds, the quality of their thoughts. Just like mine were 10 years ago, it’s like, oh yeah, yay, yay, yay, we gotta go in there and help them clean up the way they think about themselves, about their body, about health. So if you know anything about cognitive behavior coaching or behavioral modification, your thoughts creates your feeling, your feeling then creates your habits. So when you help your client clean up what’s happening in their brain, you then make them relieve in their emotion, and then they can have productive health promoting behavior. So yeah, Ingrid, it’s a twofold, then I wanna say a fourfold approach. Mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. And the physical one is not about giving them more to do, it’s actually prioritizing the little bits and then cleaning up so there’s more space and resources for them to do more in the future. We have an expert in our program, her name is Bet Rosen, she’s a clinical dietician specializing in gut health. That’s all she does from a health at every size and intuitive eating approach, and her protocol is only six weeks. Six weeks, that’s it. And she only gets client to the protocol of gut health, whatever she does, once they first onboarded the basic of intuitive eating, that they eat when they’re hungry, fullness and satisfaction, and there’s no food rules, like she cleans all that up first. Once the client is at a state where they’re eating peacefully, then they engage into a only six weeks protocol. And the goal of the protocol is to eat more diverse food, it’s not to find a list of food to restrict. She teaches a class in our program, and she’s one of our referral practitioner because most of us don’t have the qualification to do that or the specialty to do that. So we do all the basic work with our client and then we refer to her for gut health specific condition that were diagnosed. And then she intervenes with a very short protocol, just to show you the difference between what most health certification and functional health train you to do versus what is actually needed. It’s phenomenal, the difference between the two.
The other thing that I haven’t talked about yet, but I wanna make sure that we cover here, it’s also in the show note, that’s called the Social Determinant of Health. What affects health in an individual versus what we are taught versus the truth is vastly different. I’m only gonna state one number for the purpose of this episode because it’s already long, but food and physical movement, fitness, only accounts for 17, one 7% of what actually impacts one’s health. Isn’t that bite blowing? It’s called the social determinant of health. You have the link in the show note, but I’m just gonna quote you other number. 7% of what an individual impacts their health is the environment, like the quality of hair. Access to medical care, 11% of what contributes to one’s health. Genetic 22%. And then here’s the banger, 24% of what impacts an individual’s health is social circumstance, like foods scarcity, people not having enough to eat, or people voluntarily not giving themselves enough to eat.
Think about that for a moment. Social connectness, education level, gender identity, sexual identity, that has a bigger impact on one’s health than actual the food they choose to put in their mouth. But the problem is we are never shown these statistics because we’re shown statistic, we’re since statistic that support the weight loss industry, that support diet culture, and that support wellness culture. Statistic that support a weight neutral approach to health in a fat phobic society or hidden, discarded, and not made public. It’s important for you to look at these research and these statistics and then talking about it with your clients so they put in perspective what really can improve their health. If I can say one thing when it comes to helping client, when it comes to their health, it’s shifting to this philosophy of self-care. You know, I was talking about approaching health from a place of love instead of fear. The way we teach you how to approach health is from a place of self care. There’s a list we give all our student of a hundred things between mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health they can teach their client to do that has nothing to do with restricting food or losing any weight. And soft coaching and therapy is a huge part of that. Emotional regulation, right, is another big piece of that. These are things you can do to help your client improve their health, and it’s gonna have ripple effect, not just with their help but with everything else in their life. Again, why we chose to call the certification, we’re gonna be launching soon life coaching cuz it’s beyond the food. So this is how you can help your client in a non-AI approach to health.
So I’m gonna go back to the question that Ingrid was asking, cuz I’ve been talking now, I don’t know how long, but it seems very long to me. I wanna make sure I answered all the question. So she talks about Metabol syndrome. I’m not gonna go into the depth of that, but metabolite syndrome is a term most often co-opted by fat phobic medical approach. So, I would really question where this Metabol syndrome belief system is coming from for you and how intertwined it is with weight. Typically that’s what it is. It’s intertwined with having to lose weight to some degree. There’s many other reason why an individual could have high blood pressure or hyperinsulinemia, a lot of it to do with stress. And same thing with inflammation, right? There’s many other reason than just the Metabol syndrome, but most often individual are trained to associate that right away with Metabol Syndrome because that support a weight centric approach to health, a k a. Reduction of weight.
You’re talking about letting the gut heal. There is no sustainable evidence that the gut needs to be healed or the gut needs to have a restricted approach to food to be healed. That’s wellness culture. That’s just myths supporting wellness cultures and protocols and philosophy of eating and supplements, and that supports the industry of wellness culture. When you go to pure scientific evidence, there’s nothing of that. So, yeah, when you look at a non diet approach to health, you won’t be focused on quote unquote gut health, cuz you’ll be much more worried about mental health and the quality of thoughts and their acceptance of their body that you will be worried about doing a 12 week protocol to quote unquote reduce the inflammation in their guts. That is true. That is something that we don’t practice in the non-AI approach to health.
So if I started to work accordingly to your program, would I actually be able to help them improve their physical health? I just wanna look at the undertone of that question. Will your client be able to learn how to improve their health? That’s the thing, like in a non-AI approach, we look at the empowerment of the client. The client creates the result, not us. We’re not in that guru, I create the result for my client because I have a wisdom that they don’t have. How can I enable them to access health promoting behavior that will help them in their current health status? Yeah, you will. If you can’t help them regulate just their emotion, the first thing that comes to mind is you can help them regulate their emotion, like their health’s gonna improve phenomenally rapidly, because that’s probably a huge part of the reason why they’re struggling with their health is they’re overwhelmed with their emotion and they’re having physical symptoms from the overload of emotion in their. So, yeah, you’ll be able to help them improve their physical health, physical health right away.
Do I need to approach this from two angle, dietary change and mental health? Well, I wanna say you will learn how to approach that from four angle. Mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical, right? The four bodies of health. So, I would love to hear from you. You’re still with me at the end of this podcast episode here, and maybe I’ve left some gap in my explanation, perhaps I forgot to talk about something, or perhaps you’re listening to that and something else is being triggered, please shoot me an [email protected]. Go to the show note, click the resources. If you’re new to the world of the non-AI approach, click the resources, read this stuff, listen to the podcast, and then come back and ask me more question, and I will create another podcast episode, or perhaps I will see you in our training program. With that in mind, I love you and I’ll see you on the next podcast.
