I Asked Her to Keep a Food Journal, And She Fired Me

A client recently ended our work together after I asked her to keep a food journal for one week.

The request came after she told me she was experiencing midlife weight gain and didn't understand why. I wasn't asking her to count calories, weigh her food, or prove that she was doing something wrong. I was using food journaling for what it can be very good at: helping us understand someone's actual eating habits and patterns so we have better information to work with.

And it got me thinking about something much bigger than food tracking.

When we hire a coach, dietitian, nutritionist, trainer—or any expert—we often want a plan. Tell me what to eat. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to fix this.

But good nutrition coaching doesn't always work that way.

Sometimes the next step isn't another meal plan. Sometimes it's paying attention.

In this episode, I'm talking about why "I eat healthy" may be completely true and still not tell us very much about what's actually happening. I'm also looking at the role food tracking can play in nutrition coaching, why it's appropriate for some people and not for others, and why our eating patterns are often much harder to remember accurately than we think.

For women in midlife, weight changes rarely exist in a vacuum. Menopause, sleep, stress, activity, pain, medications and lifestyle changes can all be part of the picture. Understanding menopause weight gain means looking at the whole person rather than simply handing someone another diet or meal plan.

Most importantly, I'm talking about the responsibility on both sides of a coaching relationship. A good coach should listen, ask questions, provide expertise and meet a client where she is. But a client also has to be willing to observe, experiment, provide information and participate in the process.

Because sustainable healthy eating and behavior change don't come from following the perfect plan.

Sometimes the most useful thing we can do isn't immediately change what we're eating.

It's getting curious about what's actually happening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. I am your host, Heather Carey, and hope you're having a great summer so far. I know that I am too, and it's been nice to have a little time off and start to gently get back on track. I wanted to talk about something today that has been on my mind a lot lately, and it's giving me a lot to think about as far as the direction of where my business is going, especially in the light of everything that's going on in the world on social media, with AI, with GLP1s.

Welcome And The Coaching Question

SPEAKER_00 1:21

I've just been doing a lot of thinking of the direction of my business. So really what I have always been in the business of is to really make eating and cooking real healthy food the priority. I have coached many, many women over many years in the food and nutrition business. And time and again, there is one theme that consistently comes up for me. People often come to nutrition coaching wanting a plan. And that makes so much sense. A plan feels concrete. It tells you what to eat for breakfast, what to buy at the grocery store, how much protein to put on your plate. It creates the reassuring sense that if you can just follow these instructions closely enough, the problem will get solved. But the plan usually isn't the hardest part. I can create you a balanced meal plan very quickly. I can give you recipes, protein goals, snack ideas, a grocery list to bring to the store with you. The harder part is what happens when you don't want the planned dinner that I have created for you, or you suddenly become too tired to cook, or your husband wants to go out instead, or you're traveling, or work gets stressful, or you eat more than you attended, and immediately think you've blown the entire week, and on and on, right? Because things happen, life happens. And that is where the real work begins.

Why Plans Are Not The Hard Part

SPEAKER_00 2:50

The deeper work is learning to observe yourself honestly, not critically, but accurately. It is noticing that you regularly skip lunch and then graze all afternoon, or that you eat balanced meals during the week but feel completely unstructured on weekends, or that you're trying so hard to eat less that you never feel satisfied. Or that's stress, loneliness, fatigue, resentment, all these changes, and that in turn changes how you eat. We have to do this, and we need to do it with a lot of kindness rather than with judgment of ourselves. Because these patterns aren't character flaws, but we can't change what we aren't willing to see. Now, the work also requires tolerating a little bit of discomfort. Again, I can just hand you the plan, but we need to then work the plan. So, not from physical hunger or deprivation, right? This is not that discomfort. But the discomfort of looking at a pattern you would rather not acknowledge. The discomfort of trying something unfamiliar, making a different choice, cooking when takeout would be easier, or discovering that the answer may not be another diet. It may be practicing a few ordinary behaviors consistently. And finally, the most important, it requires your participation. So as a coach, I can provide you with the expertise, I can ask you the right questions, I can recognize patterns, and I and I can definitely suggest strategies for you, but I can't live inside of your life. I can't know what happens in your kitchen at four o'clock in the afternoon unless you are willing to examine it with me together. I can't pretend to understand why you're not losing weight unless you honestly tell me what you are eating. And I can't create a plan that anticipates every restaurant you go to, vacations, stressful day, or your change in appetite, even. The goal of coaching shouldn't be to make someone dependent on the plan or dependent on me as your coach. It should be to help you understand yourself well enough to make thoughtful decisions when there is no plan. Because a plan can tell you what to eat on an ideal Tuesday, but lasting change comes from learning how to feed yourself on all of the other days. And if weight loss is your goal, for example, it teaches you how to do that too, consistently, slowly, and successfully. So let me get to where I'm going to. I recently asked a client to keep a food journal for one week. And in turn, she fired me. Okay, perhaps it wasn't quite that simple, but that request was part of a conversation that ultimately ended our work together. And yes, my first reaction was frustration. I was frustrated because I wasn't asking her to count every calorie for the rest of her life. I wasn't asking her to weigh her food or calculate her macros or report every single bite to me so I could decide whether she's been good or bad, right? This is not about judging her or telling her that she was wrong to eat this and

The Food Journal That Ended Coaching

SPEAKER_00 6:20

right to eat that. I wasn't accusing her of lying and I wasn't assuming she was doing something wrong. She had come to me with a concern. Her weight was changing. She didn't understand why. And what we had already been discussing wasn't really fully explaining it, because we had been on a good roll for a little while. So I did what I believed a responsible nutrition professional should do. I asked her for more information. I asked her to write down what she ate for one ordinary week, not forever, but just for seven days, five days even. Because I can make guesses all day long. I can offer general advice. I can hand someone another high-protein breakfast recipe or tell her to eat more vegetables rather than eat the brown rice. But if a client is telling me that something is happening in her body and neither of us understands why, I need to know what's actually going on and what we're working with. I can't coach what I can't see. All right, before I go any further, I want to be very clear about what this episode is and what it isn't. I'm changing any identifying details, obviously, because I'm not going to share private information about a former client. This isn't an episode about putting someone on trial or proving that I was right or criticizing a person for deciding that I wasn't right and I wasn't the right coach for her. She was entitled to make that decision. And I'm also not suggesting that everyone should keep a food journal. Food tracking can be genuinely sometimes unhelpful, actually. Okay, it can even be harmful

When Tracking Helps And When It Hurts

SPEAKER_00 8:06

in extreme cases. For someone who may have a history of disordered eating or obsessive tracking or a lot of shame around food, this can be very triggering. There are other ways to gather information, and any good coach should take that history into account. On the other hand, tracking your food for just a little while has been proven, has been studied and proven to help significantly with weight loss. Do you want to know why you're gaining weight? It comes from how much food you're eating, and we need to reduce that and we need to see what's going on because a lot of times you might be eating something that you think is very healthy or not as caloric, and it just gives us a lot of really good information and insight. So this experience stayed with me. At first, I think it stayed with me because I felt misunderstood. A request that I intended as curiosity seemed to be received as criticism. I thought I was saying, let's collect some information so we can figure this out together. But it may have sounded more like you must be doing something wrong, and now you need to prove to me what you're eating. And those are two very, very different messages. And I understand that. And could I have explained my reasoning more clearly? Maybe. That is always worth asking. But after I got past my initial frustration, I realized that what was bothering me wasn't simply that a client didn't want to keep a food journal. This experience touched on a much bigger tension I've seen throughout my years of nutrition coaching. People come to a nutritionist because they are seeking help. And very often, what they imagine that help will look like is a plan. Tell me exactly what to eat. Give me the meals, the recipes, the grocery list, and the rules. Tell me what I should be eating. Tell me the one thing I'm missing, and tell me how to fix this and tell me how to do it fast. And I understand why. A plan feels clear, it feels safe. It holds out the possibility that someone else has finally found the answer and all you have to do is follow my plan. But what happens when the nutrition coach doesn't immediately hand you the answer? Or what happens when she starts asking questions? What happens when she asks you to observe your own behavior and collect some information or participate in figuring out what is going on? Sometimes that can feel disappointing. It can feel as though you hired an expert for answers and were given homework instead. And it can feel very vulnerable too, right? Because food is very personal for many, many people. But listen, a nutrition coach isn't a car repair service person. You can't drop off your body, tell someone what isn't working, and return a week later to pick it up after the problem has been fixed. You are part of the process. Not because you caused every problem and not because you should be blamed for it, but because you are the only person living inside of your actual life. So a coach can bring expertise. She can recognize patterns, provide evidence-based guidance, and help you find practical strategies. But I can't know what happens when you are stressed out, or when you skip lunch, or when you're eating over the kitchen sink, or when you arrive home ravenous at the end of the day, unless the two of us are willing to look at it together. And that led me to a question I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Why do we keep looking for someone to tell us what to eat when most of us already know quite a lot about healthy eating? I mean, you can't ignore it all over the internet, although the internet nowadays, it seems like, doesn't even talk about food. It talks more about getting really skinny really fast and doing that through a medication or a peptide or a supplement. Anyway, most women I work with do not need to be told that vegetables are nutritious. This client did not need me to tell her that

Why We Keep Asking What To Eat

SPEAKER_00 12:30

she needs to eat more vegetables. I promise you, she was eating them. They know that protein matters. We talked about that a lot in our sessions. They know that cooking at home can be helpful and that eating cookies for dinner probably won't leave them feeling their best. This client knew all of this too, and she was doing this, which is why I wanted her to go deeper and keep a food journal. Maybe I could see something she could not see. The problem usually isn't a total lack of nutrition information. In fact, many women have far too much of it. We're drowning in it, okay, and much of it is conflicting. The harder question is what are you actually doing in the context of your real life? What keeps getting in the way? And are you willing to look at that without turning it into a judgment about who you are? That is where nutrition coaching really begins. Because I'm not judging you. Believe me, I have been around the block with food and emotional eating and overeating. I get it. I get it all. Okay. I have been there. I have been on and off diets for, you know, I well, not recently. I was growing up. I have stories galore about that. You can go back into my old podcast and listen to all of those stories. I get it. This is not about judging. This is just plain detective. So that's where nutrition coaching really begins, not with the perfect plan, but with trying to understand what is happening right now. And a very common conversation in my office goes something like this. A woman comes to me and says, I'm gaining weight and I don't understand why. And she may tell me that the weight is appearing around her middle, that her clothes no longer fit the way they used to, or that the strategies she relied on when she was younger aren't working anymore. And she's frustrated. She may be frightened that the weight will continue to climb. And very often she genuinely feels that the change makes no sense. So I ask what she is currently eating. And she says, I eat really healthy. I'm a vegan. I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat this. I eat that. I know about this.

“I Eat Healthy” Is Not Data

SPEAKER_00 14:45

I take this supplement. I believe her. I don't hear that statement and immediately think, no, you don't. She may be eating plenty of nutritious foods. She may cook most of her meals, buy good ingredients, and know far more about nutrition than she gives herself credit for. But the I eat healthy still doesn't give me enough information to understand what is happening. Healthy is an incredibly broad word. It describes our judgment about food or a meal. It doesn't necessarily describe whether that meal is satisfying, balanced, or appropriate for that particular person. It also doesn't tell me how much she is eating, how regularly she is eating, whether she enjoys her meals, or how those meals fit into the rest of her day. I mean, we can healthy food still has calories in it, right? And I think you know enough if you've listened to me by now that calories do count. Okay? I don't care what you hear on the internet, calories do count. Let's take a smoothie, for example. A smoothie could contain Greek yogurt, fruit, milk, chia seeds, nut butter, and be a substantial breakfast. Or it could be a banana, a handful of berries, and a splash of almond milk, and leave someone hungry an hour later. Both smoothies may be described as healthy, but they're not doing the same job. Same might be true for a salad, for example. A salad with chicken or salmon, beans, grains, vegetables, avocado, and a flavorful dressing might be a complete and satisfying meal. But a bowl of lettuce, cucumbers, and a few cherry tomatoes may look virtuous, but it may not contain enough energy, protein, or satisfaction to carry someone through the afternoon. Then three o'clock arrives, and this client starts looking for something to eat because she's starving. And so maybe she has a handful of nuts or a couple of her kids' chips. I mean, nuts are nutritious, or the chips whole grain. Then she takes a few crackers while she's making tea. Later she eats part of a protein bar because she still feels unsettled. At five o'clock, she picks out the ingredients while preparing dinner. None of those foods is inherently a problem, but together they tell me that lunch didn't work. So if I only focused on the afternoon eating, I might tell her to stop snacking, but that could completely miss the point. The real issue may not be a lack of willpower in the afternoon. It may be an inadequate lunch. I see this all the time, all the time. And this is why context matters. Someone can eat almost entirely nutritious food and still be underfed during the first half of the day. She may be trying so hard to control her weight that breakfast and lunch are simply too small. She spends the day being good, and by evening, her body is asking to be fed. She might interpret that evening hunger as emotional eating or lack of discipline or sugar addiction, but sometimes it's simply hunger, physical hunger that has been accumulating since morning. Or the pattern may be completely different. She may eat satisfying, balanced meals from Monday through Thursday when her days are structured. Then Friday night arrives. There are restaurant meals, wine, appetizers, skip breakfasts, social events, or more eating between the meals. Nothing dramatic happens at any single meal, but the rhythm of the weekend is totally different from the rhythm of the week. You could add in hundreds and hundreds of calories in a two-day period on a weekend. Now again, this does not mean that she is doing something wrong. It means that I eat healthy, right? That quote, I eat healthy, doesn't show us the entire pattern. I also frequently hear, I barely eat anything. I just look at food and I gain weight. And that may accurately describe how the person experiences her day. She may not sit down to large meals, she may skip breakfast, eat a very light lunch, and have a modest dinner. But she also may be having bites, tastes, or licks or handfuls throughout the day, a few crackers while standing in the kitchen, cheese while making dinner, the rest of her kids' snack, something sweet after lunch, a latte in the afternoon, a few spoonfuls of something while putting leftovers away. Maybe she never feels as though she has had a real meal. So her honest impression is that she hasn't eaten very much. This isn't about catching someone in a contradiction. I want to be so clear on this. I get this. All right. This is just not understanding that. It's not understanding eating. It's not being present and being mindful, right? And once we get mindful about our eating, we can start to recognize where these little things can play out during the day. Now it's also about recognizing that eating is not always made up of three clearly defined meals that we can easily recall at the end of the day. Most of us remember the meals. We remember the salad we had for lunch and the salmon we made for dinner. We don't necessarily remember every handful, bite, taste, or drink. We may not remember that we skipped lunch on Tuesday or ate while distracted on Wednesday. We may forget the evening when we repeatedly went back into the kitchen because we never felt satisfied. And that is entirely human. Research on dietary recall consistently shows that people are not especially accurate historians of their own food intake. People think they eat a lot less than they actually do. We think we exercise more and we eat less. That is just fact. Okay, that has been well studied. That doesn't mean people are deliberately hiding what they eat. Memory is selective, portions are difficult to estimate, and distracted eating often barely registers as an event. We also remember our intentions. If we intended to eat a substantial lunch every day, our mind

The Snacks You Forget To Mention

SPEAKER_00 21:17

may create a general story that we usually do, even if the week itself looked much more inconsistent. And then there is the emotional meaning attached to food. Most people don't want to tell a nutritionist that they ate six cookies after dinner. Even when the nutritionist isn't judging them, they may already be judging themselves. And shame can cause us to minimize, forget, or describe food in a way that feels safer. This is why I'm not satisfied with simply hearing I eat healthy, offering a generic list of healthier foods, and sending someone on her way. If she's already eating many nutritious foods and still struggling, she doesn't need me to tell her to eat more broccoli. I need to understand the structure beneath the food choices. For example, when do you eat? Are you hungry when you begin? Are you physically hungry? Right? And we pick that apart too, right? That's a much different hunger than being emotionally hungry. Are you satisfied when you finish? Do you have enough protein, carbs, fats, and overall food at your meals? Are you eating differently on stressful days? How about your sleep? Are you sleeping okay? How many hours? Are you moving less because you're in pain or you're exhausted? Have medications changed for you? Is alcohol involved? Are there medical issues that deserve more attention? Are you comparing your current body to a body that you had 20 years ago? And because we're talking about women in midlife, I'm also considering the larger context. Menopause can affect body composition and where fat is stored. Aging is definitely accompanied by a gradual loss of muscle. Sleep disruption, stress, pain, changing activity levels, and medications all matter. Weight change is not just always explained by one food or one behavior. So a food journal cannot diagnose all of that, and it certainly cannot prove exactly why someone has gained weight, but it can give us one important part of the picture. It can help us stop relying on vague impressions and begin asking more useful questions. Maybe I look at the journal and discover that your eating is balanced, consistent, and satisfying. That is useful information too. It tells me that we may need to look elsewhere rather than automatically cutting more food. The purpose isn't to find evidence against you, the purpose is to understand you. Because without information, all I can do is take a guess. And guessing may lead me to recommend less foods to someone who is already underfed, more restriction to someone who is already preoccupied with food, or a generic meal plan that has nothing to do with the actual problem. That is not responsible coaching. So when I ask someone to show me what an ordinary week looks like, I'm not saying to you, prove that you're telling the truth. I'm saying, let's look at this together. Let's see what your days actually ask of you. Let's figure out where you're nourished, where you're struggling, and what might make things easier for you. Because I can't coach a general impression. I can't coach the word healthy. I cannot coach what I cannot see. But sometimes being asked to look more closely at what is happening doesn't feel like help. It feels like homework. And I think this is where an important disconnect can happen between a client and a coach. A client comes to a nutrition professional like me with a problem. She's gaining weight. She doesn't feel comfortable in her body. What used to work no longer works, and she wants an answer. She may reasonably expect the expert to give her one. Me. Tell me what to eat. Tell me what to stop eating. Give me the breakfast, the lunch, the dinner, the snacks. Tell me how much protein I need. Give me the grocery list. Give me the recipes. Tell me what I'm doing wrong. And tell me how to fix it. Right? Because she's hired me and she expects me to provide a solution. But instead of immediately handing her a plan, I'm going to start asking questions. What does your breakfast look like? How hungry are you in the afternoon? What happens on the weekends? Are you satisfied after dinner? How are you sleeping? How has your activity changed? What are you eating on the days when you're busy, tired, or stressed? And then the coach says, I'd like you to write down what you eat for one week so we can look at it together. Now, from the client's perspective, that may feel like the opposite of what she came for. She wanted an answer and said she received an assignment. She wanted a plan. And instead, she was asked to gather information. She wanted the expert to tell her what to do. And instead, the expert, me, asked her to participate in figuring out what was happening. And I can understand how that might be disappointing. If you're already frustrated with your body, the last thing you want is another task. You may be thinking, I came here because I don't know what to do. If I already knew how to solve this, I wouldn't have hired you. But asking questions is not the same thing as failing to provide expertise. Sometimes asking questions is the most responsible use of that expertise. The food journal wasn't the plan. It was the information we needed before creating one. So otherwise, what exactly would I be basing a plan on? I could give almost anyone a polished seven-day menu. I could go on AI right now, so could you, and do it in about five minutes. I could fill it with Greek yogurt, eggs, salmon, lentils, whole grains, vegetables, and perfectly proportioned snacks. It could all look very healthy. It might even be nutritionally balanced. But would it address why this particular woman is struggling? Would it account for the fact that she hates eggs, has no appetite in the morning, travels every other week, eats dinner with her husband, doesn't enjoy cooking, or becomes ravenous late in the afternoon? Would it help me understand whether she needs more structure, more food earlier in the day, more satisfying meals, fewer food rules, or possibly a medical evaluation rather than another diet? A plan created without enough information may look professional, but it is still a guess. And that is not what I believe good coaching should be. And that's not what I'm going to do or have not done in a very, very long time. My job is not to produce a document that proves I did my job or create work for myself that you will not follow. My job is to help a client understand what is happening and identify changes that are both useful and realistic. That means I may not always give someone the kind of help she imagined receiving. Sometimes I need to slow the process down. Sometimes I need to say, before I tell you what to change, I want to understand what you're already doing. And sometimes the thing that feels least like the help you wanted is the very thing a coach needs in order to help you. Now there's another reason this can be difficult. Being given a plan allows us to focus on the future. We get to imagine the version of ourselves who will begin on Monday, buy all the groceries, prepare every meal, and finally do everything correctly. Right? Now we're doing everything right. Being asked to observe ourselves brings us back to the present. What am I doing right now? What happens when I'm tired? What am I avoiding? Which habits are helping me? Which ones aren't? Where is the gap between what I intend to do and what I am actually able or willing to do?

Real Coaching Means Participation

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Those questions can feel uncomfortable. Not because the answers reveal that we are bad or dishonest, but because observation replaces the story we have about our habits with the reality of our habits. And reality is usually much messier than the new plan. This is also where the word fix becomes important. A person is not a broken appliance. Okay. You cannot hand yourself over to a nutritionist, receive a new set of instructions, and come back repaired. There may be nutritional problems we can solve, skills we can teach, like cooking, and strategies that make an enormous difference. But lasting change still has to be lived by the person sitting across from us. So that doesn't mean she's to blame for every difficulty. Bodies change, menopause matters, genetics matter, medications, sleep, stress, pain, caregiving, finances, on and on, right? Access to food, these all matter. So there's many things that we can control, and there's so many things that we are not in control of. So participation does not mean accepting blame. It means being willing to investigate what is within reach. So I can bring you knowledge, perspective, and guidance, but I cannot do the observing for you. I can't test a new breakfast inside of your body. I can't know whether a meal satisfied you. I can't discover what happens in your kitchen at four o'clock unless you're willing to bring that information into the room with me. The client is not a passive recipient of the coach's wisdom. She's the person with the most important information. So good coaching brings those two forms of knowledge together: my professional expertise and the client's lived experience. Now, without my expertise, the client may remain overwhelmed by conflicting information. And without the client's participation, the coach is working from assumptions. So we need both. But participation is not always what people believe they are purchasing when they hire an expert. Sometimes what they are hoping to purchase is certainty. And this is why plans are so appealing. A plan feels certain. It takes all the noise of nutrition and turns it into a set of instructions. Eat this breakfast, have this much protein. So the goal, the ultimate goal, okay, of meeting with a nutritionist and developing a relationship, a trusting relationship between me and my clients is so you become capable of feeding yourself in your own actual life. And that the goals you have, which could mean weight loss, more energy, whatever it is, can happen. And that brings us to the real distinction at the heart of this conversation. Knowing what healthy eating looks like is not the same thing as being able to practice it consistently. We tend to assume that if someone is struggling with food, she must need more nutrition information. Maybe she needs another recipe, a better meal plan, a list of high protein snacks, a lesson on carbohydrates, a chart showing which food contains fiber, an explanation of what to order at a restaurant. Sometimes information is exactly what is missing. Nutrition has become so confusing that good reliable education can be incredibly valuable, actually. But most of the women who come to me, they already know this. They get it. They already know this. Okay, they need to start doing some more of the work, right? They know vegetables are good for them. They know protein helps with satiety. We know, as a woman in menopause, yes, we need 100 grams of protein a day and we need to maintain our muscles. We already know that. You're on Instagram. I know you see that. They know that beans and whole grains and fruit and fish and nuts and seeds can be part of a nutritious diet. They know that cooking more often can be helpful. You know that eating a real lunch will probably serve you better than picking at snacks all afternoon. Something's clearly not working for you. You may not know every nutritional detail, but you are not beginning with zero information. And in fact, most women have the opposite problem. They've absorbed decades of nutrition information, decades of diets, decades of how to eat, you know, ideas, most of it conflicting. You've gotten this from magazines and diet programs and books and podcasts and social media and wellness gurus. You know about calories. You've all been to Weight Watchers. I know you have, okay? I know everyone, every single one of my clients went through the Weight Watchers program at some point in their life. You know about macros and carbs and how many fat grams and the glycemic index and your fasting windows and intermittent fasting and protein targets. You've downloaded meal plans. You can get meal plans in two seconds on the internet. You've saved hundreds of recipes, you've rifted them out of magazines, and you have followed people who show you exactly what to eat in a day. So we have more access to nutrition information than at any other time in history. And if information alone changed behavior, it would have been solved by now, right? So information and behavior are not the same thing. Knowing that you would feel better after eating a substantial lunch doesn't necessarily mean that you will stop working long enough to make that change. Knowing that you need more protein doesn't help if you don't enjoy the protein foods someone recommended. Or knowing that planning dinner would make the evening so much easier, it doesn't automatically give you the energy to plan after a day of work, caregiving, and decision making. This is a space between what we know and what we do. And that space is where most of the real work takes place. So when someone isn't doing what she knows would support her, or our culture is quick to diagnose a motivation problem, such as like you need more discipline, or you need to want it badly enough, or you need to commit. But behavior is more complicated than that. Maybe you understand that breakfast might help, but you're not hungry in the morning. Maybe you want to cook, maybe you're you're cooking curious, but you've never become comfortable improvising in the kitchen. So every meal feels like a project and a chore. Or maybe you're doing something like buying groceries, but then you're working late, and so you come home exhausted and you just end up ordering food anyway. None of this means that change is impossible. It means that we need to identify the actual obstacles. And because if the obstacles are exhaustion, for example, another recipe, another meal plan, another shopping list is not going to be your answer. If the obstacle is fear of eating enough, a calorie-restricted plan may make the problem worse. If the obstacle is perfectionism, which I have a lot of in my clients, giving someone more rules may strengthen the very pattern that's keeping you stuck. And if the obstacle is that you don't cook, I also have a lot of those, handing her an elaborate menu, I mean, giving you a menu when you are have a lot of fear around cooking, is not going to do anything for you. That's just going to create more fear. So if the obstacle is believing that every imperfect choice represents failure, the work may be learning how to continue after an imperfect choice, not finding a plan that eliminates them. So when someone asks me, what should I eat? There is often another question underneath it that they're not asking me. And that can be anything like, how do I make myself do this consistently? Or how do I stop starting over? How does every week become like another, okay, it's Monday again? How do I take care of myself when life gets difficult? Right? Because life happens, right? And we need to roll with it no matter what. And how do I know whether I'm even eating enough or if I'm eating too much? How do I make a choice without being certain it's the perfect one? All these kinds of questions require a lot of curiosity about the individual person. What happens before the behavior? What need is the behavior even meeting? And what makes the desired choice difficult? What would make it easier? Is the proposed change realistic enough to repeat? That is why coaching often involves experiments rather than commandments. Let's see what happens if you eat a more substantial lunch this week. Let's create three dinners you can make when you're so tired that all you have to do is cook them without a recipe. Let's try stopping to overhaul breakfast, lunch, and dinner and sleep all at once, right? Let's do one thing at a time. But we're anxious, right, to get very, very quick results, right? Rather than trying these little kind of experiments. But this is what makes progress. This is what makes change. So this is where people can often become, I think, discouraged. They believe that knowing better should mean doing better automatically. So when their behavior doesn't match their knowledge, they interpret the gap as a personal failure. I know what I'm supposed to do. Why can't I just do it? But knowing is not the final stage of change. It's actually the beginning of change. A skill has to be practiced, a routine has to be made easier. We have to try new things. We have to try and see if that works. And if it doesn't, then we try something different. A strategy has to be to survive stressful days. When you travel, when you're bored, when you're exhausted and you're changing circumstances. We don't expect someone to become a confident cook because she read a cookbook. We don't expect someone to become strong because she understands how strength training works. And we shouldn't expect a person to transform decades of eating patterns simply because she received the correct information in one session. The question isn't only, do you know what to do? It's also, can you do it in the life that you currently have? What happens when you try? Where does it break down? What support scale or adjustment would make it more possible? That is not avoiding personal responsibility. It's making responsibility useful. Blaming yourself tells you that you failed. Observing yourself gives you somewhere to go next. And that is why I asked for the food journal. Not because I believed my client needed another lesson in which foods were healthy. I needed to understand the gap between what she knew, what she intended to do, and what she actually was doing and what was happening in her life. The journal was not a test of whether she knew enough. It was an invitation to look at the behavior together. But looking honestly at our behavior can feel much more vulnerable than receiving another plan. Because once we move beyond the information, we have to confront the patterns, expectations, and the long history we bring to food. And for so many women in midlife, that history often includes decades of being told that the answer is one more set of rules. Okay, so overall, after all of this, I think what is required is to be honest about what coaching is, more specifically, nutrition coaching. A coach can absolutely bring expertise. I can translate the nutrition science to you all day long. I can challenge misinformation. I've done it a million times on this podcast. I can notice patterns and I can suggest strategies that my clients may not have considered. I can help someone create structure, solve practical problems around food, and separate useful health behaviors from

Trust, Responsibility, And Closing Thoughts

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all the diet culture noise. And I can listen without judgment. I can help you recover from an all-or-nothing week without prescribing punishment because I know how punishing food can feel sometimes. And I can remind someone that changing a long-standing pattern takes a lot of practice. Okay? It takes a lot of forgiveness and a lot of practice. But as a coach, I cannot do my client's part. I cannot know what's happening unless you are willing to tell me. And I can't know whether breakfast satisfied you, whether you're hungry all afternoon, or whether you just liked the meal, or whether the strategy became impossible as soon as work got busy. That doesn't mean a client has to perform perfectly for me. Absolutely not. There's no perfection about eating. Participation is not compliance. I'm not looking for someone to follow every instruction without question. In fact, I want a client to tell me when a recommendation doesn't work. I want to hear things like, I tried that breakfast and I was hungry an hour later, or I'm not going to cook for four nights a week. Or that amount of food is absolutely terrifying for me. Like that seems like too much, or I couldn't do this while I was traveling, or I don't like those foods, or writing everything down makes me feel obsessive about food. Let's talk about that then. It's all useful information. So participation means staying in the conversation, not bailing at the end when it feels uncomfortable. It means being willing to observe, try, respond, and adjust. And it means allowing the coaching process to become collaborative instead of waiting for the coach to uncover the perfect answers independently. A good coaching relationship combines two kinds of expertise. Now I have the education and professional experience. I totally understand nutrition. This is all I do for a living. This is all I do in my spare time, is understand nutrition and study nutrition, study food, cook food. I understand behavior change and many of the common challenges women face in midlife. I am a woman in midlife, squarely put. Okay, I know exactly what's going on. But the client is the expert of her own life. She knows which foods she enjoys, what her mornings feel like, what her family will eat, how much time she has, what she can afford, and what previous diets have done to her relationship with food. I mean, I don't live in her skin, right? I can relate to it, but I need to hear directly from her. I need to hear from you what is going on. Neither form of expertise is enough on its own. So if I ignore your lived experience and simply impose my plan on you, I may give you something that looks excellent on paper or something that I love and would work for me, but would totally fail you in your life. If the client withholds the information I need and rejects observation or expects me to produce certainty without her participation, I'm also working with an incomplete picture. Okay, so we know this already. So coaching happens in the exchange between us. And that was that involves responsibility on both ends. So when I think back to the conversation that I started at the beginning of this episode, I can see more than one truth. I can understand why the request may have landed badly. If someone already felt frustrated and vulnerable about her weight, being asked to document her eating may have sounded like suspicion or criticism. I can consider whether I could have explained the purpose more clearly. And I can respect that every client has the right to decide whether a coach or an approach is right for her. But I can also be honest about what I need in order to do my job responsibly. If someone comes to me saying, my weight is changing, I don't understand why, and I want your help, I need information from you. I need curiosity and I need a willingness to look at what is happening. And I need a bit of trust from my client, right? As they do from me. They need to be able to trust me and I need to be able to trust them. I cannot responsibly invent an explanation simply because the answer is expected. I can't promise that a meal plan will produce a specific result. And I can't participate in the idea that the client's role is to bring me a body she dislikes, and my role is to fix it. My role is to help her investigate. I want to provide sound nutrition guidance and identify patterns and possibilities and to help her make changes that are realistic, meaningful, and sustainable. Not to be perfect, right? That's not her role to be perfect, it's to participate. And that is the distinction this experience clarified for me. People often come to nutrition coaching wanting the plan. But the plan usually isn't the hard part. The deeper work is learning to observe yourself honestly, not harshly, but accurately. It's understanding your patterns, tolerating some uncertainty, and participating in changes that have to work in your real life. A plan can tell you what to eat on an ideal Tuesday, but coaching should help you know how to feed yourself on all the other days. So, yes, I asked someone to write down what she ate for seven days, and she fired me. And after thinking about it, I realized I would ask her to do it all over again. I'm always curious to know what you think and what you feel about nutrition coaching. If you've had experiences with nutrition coaching, has it been successful for you? Has it been unsuccessful? And just and what your thoughts are on it. As always, please reach out to me. My website is in the show notes. I would love to hear from you and just get your feedback on this. All right, everyone. Have a fantastic day and an amazing rest of your summer. And can't wait to talk to you again next week. Bye for now.