5 Ways to Use Coaching to Exponentially Reach Your Health & Weight Loss Goals

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5 Ways to Use Coaching to Exponentially Reach Your Health & Weight Loss Goals

Hiring my first coach was a humbling experience. I already had a degree in Kinesiology. I was a Certified Nutrition Educator and studied Nutrition in undergrad.

I also already had a rocking fitness & nutrition company that served thousands in Silicon Valley.

So it was hard to think I needed help with food and my body… Yet I was sugar-addicted, overeating, obsessed with food, and hiding the embarrassment as hard as I could.

But my life changed the moment I STOPPED believing:

1) I have all the answers.

2) I can figure it out on my own.

The moment I decided I should get some support (because clearly what I had been doing wasn’t working) was the moment my life changed.

In today’s episode, I share 5 powerful ways coaching can help you get out of your own way and ultimately help you live the life of your dreams in a body that you like.

TIMESTAMPS:

[00:02:29] Coaching leads to crushing goals.

[00:03:57] Struggling with our relationship with food.

[00:07:31] The power of coaching.

[00:10:56] Losing control of eating.

[00:13:33] The power of one-on-one accountability.

[00:18:12] Working with the right coach.

[00:20:29] Finding balance with food.

[00:24:00] The value of coaching.

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Full Episode Transcript:

If you are new into my world, my name is Audra. I help women heal the deeper reasons why they struggle with food and body in the first place.

We heal the deeper reasons why we would be reaching for food every time we’re bored or we’re sad or we’re lonely or we’re tired or we’re angry. Basically, all the ways that cause all sorts of disruptions with our body. All sorts of disruptions with our heart, mind, and soul. Come on in and say hi. If you are watching the replay, hashtag replay, let me know that you are here.

And today is a very exciting day. We have been deep inside of our path to food and body freedom, five-day free challenge. So this is a free event that I have been putting on I quit doing it for a while and then I brought it back at the end of last year. So really excited to be teaching in this way.

 Hello, body freedom.com forward slash five-day-path. If you have not registered for the challenge, the five days of content of mind-blowing life-changing get on the bandwagon and change.

If you are serious about the trajectory of a sustainable weight loss journey of healing a messed up relationship with food, where you’re not so obsessed around food, then even though we’re on day five of our five-day path we still have three bonus support sessions and we still have the entire weekend where we are helping all of the challengers get it coached and basically move through this entire program. So it is not too late.

So if you register right now, you will still get access, instant access to all of the replays and, we still have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we have.

No, Sunday, six days where you can participate, you can get your questions answered. So I really hope to see you there. And yay. So there’s that. And so let me go ahead and pop this back up here, which is chat with Audra because today, since we are talking about Hello Body Freedom. We were talking about this path to freedom.

I thought it would be really great to understand like what coaching is and five ways that coaching absolutely leads to crushing your goals. Again, if you are new here, come on in and say, hi, give me a hello. How are you guys doing? I taught yoga earlier today and it is just, been a stay in my yoga clothes all day long. 

And that feels like fun. Who gets to have days like that? They’re like my favorite days. If you are new into my world, hello, body freedom. I’m the founder of it. We help women heal the deeper reasons why they struggle. And today, let’s talk about what makes our Hello Body Freedom VIP coaching program so powerful.

And I think that this is a very important conversation because the coaching in and of itself is a huge piece of the puzzle that is missing for most people. Again, if you have missed the five-day challenge, the instant replay is still up and let’s say you’re catching this replay because you want to know more about coaching and we’re not even in the middle of a challenge.

If you just drop me a DM. We can start to help you understand the work that we’re talking about here because at the end of the day, I know what’s out there. I know that there’s fricking weight watchers programs, and then there’s noom apps. And then there’s, weight loss online programs.

There’s all of these memberships that you can be a part of, but the truth of the matter is that when the reason why you are struggling with your body, struggling with your relationship with food very often it’s a little deeper than we care to understand or admit, and it’s actually pretty hard to get truly unstuck.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t white knuckle it and you can’t rock it through a diet plan. Or when, whenever things in life, are going great. And that’s usually the case for most of us, but that’s usually not when we struggle. The bigger struggle is when all of a sudden life hands us a shit sandwich.

All of a sudden things get really stressed out in our world, right? And, the thing is that not everybody on the planet,  when they have a stressful situation in their life, do they go use food and eat? But for me, that’s how what I learned how to do. I learned that life gets crazy.

Life gets stressful. Face down in a plate of nachos and a pint of margaritas or something, right? And if that is you as well, then what we have is we have really strong habit loops of using food to fix problems. When actually food is a really good fix for physical hunger. It’s not the best fix.

I’m not saying that it doesn’t work because it did work. It worked for me. I used food all the time. It was my number one answer for a very long time. But at the end of the day, if we’re struggling with our relationship with food, if we feel like food has control over us, if we feel uncomfortable in our body, usually there is an untangling of feelings and food that needs to happen.

And this usually requires extra support. And so understanding coaching in this way, I’m really excited to dive into the five ways that when you use coaching in the right way, that it can absolutely lead to exponentially crushing your goals, exponentially, not just, buckling down and white-knuckling it in order to lose weight, but actually have a transformative experience.

Okay. The very first one I want to talk about is the power of meeting you where you are. And what I mean by that is if you are in some, giant thousands of people membership with some protocol that you have to follow exactly. That’s not really meeting you exactly where you are because every single one of us is on a different level.

We all have a different trauma body. We all have different like mindset loops  that aren’t serving us. We have different habits and behaviors. Some of them are a little bit easier to change. Some of them are a little harder depending on who you are. Depending on your past, depending on your experience, right?

But when you have a coach who can meet you exactly where you are, and then from that place go, okay, this is where you are. I can see where you want to go. And these are your individual steps of how to get there, right? So this is about tweaking the process to work for your specific strengths, for your specific weaknesses, right?

 And, following some online course, following some step-by-step that somebody put together, it’s generic, I’m not saying that it hasn’t been well thought out. We have steps that we follow in Hello Body Freedom, but at the end of the day, what VIP coaching does is it takes what we have, it takes this giant body of work that we are using to heal the deeper reasons why you’re struggling with food in your body.

And man, we’re going to meet with you and go, where are you starting from? What exactly are your struggles? Because from my experience with working with hundreds, if not thousands of clients at this point is that everybody’s a little different. Everybody’s starting from a different point and it really matters.

If you want to get the biggest bang for your buck, if you want to really crush your goals, you need that level of interaction, that level of personalization. And that is a very powerful part of coaching. Now that’s the power of meeting you right where you’re at. The second one I want to go over is the power of knowledge and experience.

Okay. So anybody that calls themselves as a coach, if you are working with them, it’s really weird. The coaching industry, I’ve been doing this my whole life. I started as a fitness coach. I had all the certifications. I got a degree. I started a fitness company and then I became a nutrition educator, right?

I went to school. I studied nutrition. I spent a year at Bowman college studying holistic nutrition. And I just, I became this person and I’m teaching at this level, right? I’m teaching at a coaching of the body. I’m teaching at a coaching of food and working step by step through that. And then from there, going into the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, really understanding what it means to work with your psychology, work with this mind-body connection in order to get you moving into the space. 

So having the knowledge the depth of knowledge. As a coach and really checking in because if you’ve participated at all inside of my Path to Food and Body Freedom challenge, the five-day challenge that what’s going on right now, if you’ve connected with any of that, what you now understand is that maybe working with a personal trainer while you’re trying to lose weight and if that hasn’t worked for you, that might not be the right level of knowledge that you need.

A lot of nutritionists know a lot about food. They know a lot about nutrition. They know a lot about how to hand you a food plan. And if you just ate the specific way that everything would be fine and you would clear up all your stuff.

But like one of our new helloBodyFreedom clients, our newest coaching clients that just came on. One of them I was just talking to, and she’s ” I just worked with a nutritionist for six months. I paid 8, 000 and I paid over between two and 500 every single month. In additional, the supplements that I was taking, because I was told that these are the things that’s going to fix me.’

This is functional diagnostic nutrition. And guess what happened? On a scale of one to 10 her digestive upset was still at a 10 still as bad as it was than when she started six months ago. And why is that? Why would that be? Because most of us who struggle with food, our relationship with food and our bodies, are not working at the nervous system level.

We are not working at this kind of a deeper mind-body connected level to decrease that stress response to regulate our nervous system to work body-based practices along with mind-based practices to integrate this as your whole person, right? If we are not doing this base-level work to stabilize and reframe and start to untangle all of these reasons that we eat, what she told me is I would listen to my nutritionist, who is my coach.

And I’m going step by step. I know exactly. And I followed those directions. I took every one of those supplements. I did the best I could, but then come the weekend, I don’t know what would happen, Audra. I would just it was like something else would take over me and I would lose my consciousness.

Now inside of the path to freedom, the five-day free challenge, you can go right now, you can learn all about the science behind why we lose the smart part of our brain, our conscious part of our brain. If you go right now and you go into day two and day three, if you go sign up for those replays and you just go catch day two and day three, you will really start to go, Oh shit.

It doesn’t matter how many supplements I take, it doesn’t matter how many diet, perfect diet plan that diet plans that the nutritionist hands my way. If I am having such an overwhelm in my nervous system that I just automatically go eat all the pizza, all the Chinese food, the whole bucket of ice cream, right?

And all of the things. Then you need a different kind of coach with a different kind of knowledge. So when I get back to the power of knowledge, you are looking for, if you are really truly looking to heal your relationship with food and be on a sustainable weight loss journey, you need to be with a coach who has that level of knowledge to heal at that level.

 And that’s how it goes. And even better than that, it’s not just some buddy that has a bunch of knowledge, but they have the experience. That’s like the extra, gold star is, Hey, great that you’ve studied all of this and great that you have the knowledge, but do you have the experience?

Have you been where I’m at? Have you been so obsessed and crazy around food? Have you gained 40 pounds and then lost 45 pounds and then gained 40 pounds and just been on the absolute struggle bus? Have you been embarrassed to go out and cancelled events because you didn’t want to be seen?

This is the price we are paying for not going deeper and working with, mind-body processes and working at a level where we start to untangle this so that we can get to freedom. That is the price we pay every time we reach for a diet plan. Every time we go I just need to join the gym.

How’s that worked for you so far? So when you are working with a coach and you are in this place if I am going to hire a business coach, I want to know that they have the knowledge,  do you have the knowledge? Do you have your MBA? Do you understand business? And do you have the experience?

Are you slaying it with your business too, right? Knowledge and experience. If you are going to work with somebody around healing these deeper reasons why we’re reaching for food, working on a sustainable weight loss journey, untangling overeating, stress eating, binge eating comfort eating, all of these other pieces that keep us stuck and make us feel like food is in control instead of us.

Where is their knowledge? Where is their experience? Okay.  So those are the first two, the power of meeting you right where you are and the power of knowledge and experience. So number three, we’ve got five today. Number three, the power of one on one accountability. Now, I don’t care how many AI bots some coaching program has set up.

Did you do this? Dude, when it’s not a human on the other side, that’s connecting with you, it’s really easy to just skip out. But when you know that you have an entire coaching team waiting for you when you know that like you were in this place because at the end of the day, the habits that you’re trying to create and instill require repetition, we have to build those new neuronal patterns and at the end of the day, old habits die hard. Old habits are strong.

You’ve maybe been doing them. I have been using food to fix my feelings. Not so much over the last decade, but for 30 years of my life, three decades of my life, completely unconscious for the first 25. These are strong unconscious habits, but what we’re trying to do is create different habits, more life-giving health, giving, moving you in the direction, you want to be in. Moving you in the direction of the woman who, you were supposed to be, who, you can become if you could just get out of your own way.

And this is where having human accountability structures in place, not just one-on-one accountability, but that, and lots of different team accountability with lots of humans who have your back because when you have that when you can’t get out of it in that moment, when you’re trying to build that new neuronal pattern, and then you realize, Oh my God, I have to do this because I said I was, and I’ve got three people looking out after me.

Okay. Boom, there it is showing up at every time you show up every time you take action, if that means that accountability structure, guess what you’re doing, you’re building that new neuronal pattern and the more you build it and the more you build it, the further and further it goes into that habit brain, the further into this unconscious practice that you have.

And now, it’s not even that hard to do anymore. That is the power of one on one accountability. And number four is the power of one-to-one connection. Okay. I want you to really hear this whenever, you can go open a magazine and find a food plan and go grocery shopping and follow that food plan.

But that’s not usually the problem. The problem is when we fall off of our healthy habits. The problem is when life gets hard. The problem when life hands us a sandwich, when stress goes up, right? This is when it counts. This is when we need that level of human connection with a coach who has knowledge and experience who can help pick you up and walk you through how to get unstuck to be able to work with what’s going on in the actual body.

Instead of pushing it away, we welcome it in. We connect it with our thoughts. We connect it with our feelings. We connect it with behaviors and we start to move forward. This level of connection is the magic. That helps you move forward.  AI chat, GPT, all of these amazing, cool things that are happening.

Nothing can replace one on one connection with an actual human that can help you. And the reason is a lot of the reasons why we’re stuck. A lot of the traumas we’ve been through, a lot of the overwhelms of our nervous systems are. Not always, but almost always because of another human, because of a boundary violation, because, somebody screams and loses their shit, right?

Something happens that creates this kind of disconnect and it’s inside of a coaching container, a safe coaching container with safe boundaries, right? Where you’re repairing and it’s in that repairing it is in that one on one conscious repairing it’s it’s that is the magic pill it all of the sudden things start to change from the inside out It’s not willpower.

It’s not white-knuckling it and yes one on one accountability can sometimes be like, okay, you said you’re gonna do this Let’s do that. Absolutely, but it’s inside of the container inside of the relationship that the magic happens. And I think that is a very important, powerful thing. So number five of like how to use coaching to just crush your goals is really, truly working with the right coach.

So tying this back in with knowledge and experience, I know some amazing personal trainers out there and sometimes working with a personal trainer is the right thing. Sometimes working with the nutritionist is the right coach, right? But if you keep reaching out to the wrong type of coach, when you are trying to work through getting unblocked, ending emotional eating, coming into a normal, sane relationship with food, working these healthy habits and really, truly working at the nervous system level, the body-based practices, breath, sound, movement, mind, body connection, going into the actual sensations and feelings of the body and working at this level in order to truly heal at the nervous system level.

That’s what we do here at Hello Body Freedom, for sure, because that’s what we want, freedom, not just a food plan to follow for a while to lose a few pounds.

But what does it mean? Two things. What does it mean to work with your nervous system, to stabilize it over and over again, to get you out of survival mode over and over again? And into thriving when you are in your thriving nervous system that is directly connected to parasympathetic nervous system, directly connected to rest and digest to thriving in the body.

What a great place to stay. What a great place to live. That’s the very first piece. How do we get there most of the time? And number two, because we know we live on planet earth and life hands us shit sandwiches. There are things that are totally out of our control. How do I have a really bad day?

How do I have a really bad week? A really bad month? How do I handle this amount of stress that just came at me? Wasn’t my fault. Just happened. How do I have that? And food is not my answer. Food’s not my answer. Booze ain’t my answer. How can I learn how to have a struggle bus day? And I don’t end up face down in a pint of ice cream or a play nachos and a pint of margaritas, whatever, right?

Whatever your thing is. I like nachos. Tex-Mex is my thing. How do I, Get to a point where food has its rightful place in my life that’s pleasurable and awesome and neutral and fits in this beautiful way that’s so connected with my own inner attunement and connection, right? And if you have been in the challenge, you have learned on day two and day three, that part of the problem is this absolute dissociation from the body, right?

How many of us that struggle with food are, it’s like we are completely cut off. We’re all wrapped up in our head. And all of this crazy going on here, but there is just no connection here and we wonder why we struggle. So the power of hiring the right coach who can work with you at this level,  who can walk you through this.

So powerful. And the other piece of this, just to give like a shout out to HelloBody Freedom Coaching, you are not just working with a coach, you are working with a coaching team. This isn’t just about one person that has your back. This is an entire team that has your back. So tuning in and feeling into that.

And just seeing how that lands for you, because I think that coaching is the best thing that has ever happened. And I do believe in therapy a lot. My partner is a licensed therapist. I’ve had lots of therapy. I think therapy is great. But if we look at therapy, like a lot of people enter into therapy.

And it’s a real it’s like this place to just get you to this kind of status quo place. It’s Oh, let’s just get you feeling okay again. Let’s just get you feeling okay again. And that is very powerful and great. But coaching is and I want to say coaching can be that I have clients who have struggled and have been struggle bussing and by all means you bring everything to the table, making everything, the entire experience you’re having, and that said, coaching is about thriving. Coaching is not, I don’t just want you, I’m totally uninterested in giving you a couple of quick tips so that way you can maybe, tap on your forehead and maybe you won’t emotionally eat right now. I want to give you an entire nervous system-like regulation.

I don’t know what the right word is. I almost was like download. I want like for you to shift and change from the inside out at a mind and body-connected nervous system level so that food is just not the answer anymore. Like all of these pieces, how do we put this together? That’s what I want. I want you to thrive at such a high level, like wherever you think that you, Keep getting stuck that you can’t get to you, but that you deserve that you are so worthy of that.

And we just have to get you out of your own way. And that is about nervous system blockages, getting out of your own way and moving forward. And that my friends, … that is the power. This is the power of coaching. So I am super excited. If you are new into my world and, or let’s say you’ve been in this challenge and you’re listening to this, hellobodyfreedom.com chat with Audra forward slash chat with Audra, get on over there. 

Book your time to talk with me right now while we’re running this challenge. There’s a lot of bonuses just for getting on the call with me. You get our Hello Body Freedom 30-day journal. And when you book your call and you show up right now, only because we are in the middle of a challenge, you are entered to win a 100 Amazon gift card.

We already have so many women booking calls because they are ready for this. They are ready. They see the value. What it means to have your hand held in coaching. One more bonus thing when you use coaching that leads to crushing your goals, just, I’m just going to leave you this one bonus is that if you put all of these five together that we’ve just talked about the absolute synergy of it, it’s how to move fast.

And I’m not talking lose 90 pounds in 90 days. That kind of coaching should just be like illegal and is just not cool. I’m talking about moving fast from a standpoint of meeting where you are of bringing in that knowledge and experience of walking you step by step of holding you accountable of creating that one-on-one connection.

So that way, When you do get blocked,  something poops, pops, you’re walking along and hit a brick wall, walking along. Coaching is you’re walking along, you hit that brick wall and then boom, your coach is there. And that brick wall just crumbles. So you can keep going forward.

That is how to get there fast. I’m uninterested in you losing weight and gaining it back again, uninterested. And that happens when our nervous system is not on board. How can we get that nervous system on board? So it is easy to stop eating at enough. So it is easy to check that mindless eating at the door.

 It is easy to let go and untangle all of these ways that we use food when we’re not hungry. It’s not even a thing. And that’s the power of coaching. All right, my friends. Thank you. Thank you so much right now. If you’re interested, hellobodyfreedom.com forward slash chat with Audra.

I cannot wait to talk to you. And if you are new into my community, cause we have so many new people here from the five-day path to freedom challenge, we do this every Tuesday and I am excited to see you there and sending you all the love, reach out. And let’s have a chat. Talk later. Bye everybody.

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