Client-Centred Success: A Holistic Approach to Weight Loss

In this solo episode, Erin Power explores a client-centred, person-centric approach to weight loss — a perspective she deeply embodies in her coaching. Whether you’re a health coach or work in any coaching field, you’ll find valuable insights on how prioritizing the client’s unique needs creates a more effective, compassionate coaching relationship.

Erin discusses the key differences between coach-centric and client-centric methods, emphasizing flexibility and personalization over rigid plans. Tune in to discover how to enhance your coaching practice by putting your clients first and fostering meaningful, tailored change.

Episode Overview:
0:00 Intro
0:11 The Importance of Client-Centric Coaching
0:57 Challenges in Weight Loss Coaching
1:46 Ethical and Holistic Coaching Approaches
3:29 Problems with Traditional Weight Loss Models
5:39 Four Pillars of Ethical Weight Loss Programming
5:53 Autonomy in Coaching Programs
7:47 Building Client Competence
10:29 Ensuring Safety in Weight Loss Programs
14:04 Individualized Coaching Strategies
15:01 Practical Application and Client Scenarios

Connect with Erin on:
Submit your questions to [e-mail]
Website: primalhealthcoach.com
Instagram: @primalhealthcoach

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Health Coach Radio is your backstage pass into the world of health and fitness coaching, hosted by Primal Health Coach Institute Coaching Director, Erin Power and powered by the legacy of founder Mark Sisson. Each episode is packed with real stories, expert strategies, and practical inspiration to help you grow as a coach and make a difference.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hey coaches, I've got a little short solo episode for you today.
I wanted to think about a client-centered
Person-centric approach to weight loss, which is the space I'm in.
So, for those of you who are also working in the weight loss realm, you might find a lot of value in this.
But actually, I think every coach in every category will find value in this because
The coaching relationship, when it's done best, is done in a client-centric way, not a coach-centric way.

Coach-centric ways are (00:25):
here's the plan, follow my plan.
A client-centric approach is
Here's some parameters, let's fit them into your life.
So, a very essential difference in how we come at programming, which is one of my favorite things to talk about with health coaches.
Please enjoy this episode.
Hi, I'm Erin Power.
I'm a health coach, a health coaching educator, and mentor, and your host of Health Coach Radio.

(00:51):
This podcast delves into the art, science, and business of health coaching.
Whether you're aspiring to land a coaching dream job or to embark on your own entrepreneurial adventure, we cover it all.
Our mission is to help you grow your career, elevate your income, change the lives of the clients who need your help, and leave a lasting mark in this rapidly growing field.

(01:12):
It's time for health coaches to make an impact.
It's time for Health Coach Radio.
Hey, coaches, welcome back to Health Coach Radio.
It's just me today, Erin, here with a solo episode I've been wanting to record for a while.
Because I've been in this industry for a long time.
I've been in the fitness industry for 30 years.
I've been a health coach for 15 years.

(01:33):
And because I've been in this industry a long time.
I've worked with thousands of women through the lens of weight loss.
And I've seen over and over again how well-meaning weight loss coaches can unknowingly cause harm.
when they create programs that are about protocols and outcomes instead of about people.
So today, I want to talk about how to build a holistic, ethical and person centric coaching program using weight loss as the example, because that's what I know.

(02:01):
But even if you work in a totally different category, like postpartum or performance or gut health or burnout, this will apply.
You can extrapolate this to your category because this is really a conversation about programming.

Which is something I love talking about (02:14):
programming that honors the human sitting in front of you.
So, why does this conversation matter?
Well,
Let's be honest, weight loss specifically is a hot button topic in the coaching space.
On the one hand, you have like diet culture and thinness obsession.
I see this a lot with my female clients.
Remember, I work with women.

(02:34):
On the other hand, you have body positivity movement where it's like we shouldn't pursue weight loss at all and we should just feel comfortable in the body we have.
And then we have weight loss injections, and we have sort of these bros who are telling us to weigh our food and track calories.
There's just a lot of noise in the industry, and stuck in the middle are our clients, real human beings who are saying things like

(02:56):
I've gained 30 pounds in per and I don't recognize myself and I don't think I'm doing everything wrong. All of a sudden,
my body's not working or every single thing I've tried.
That used to work doesn't work anymore, or I don't really want to be like obsessed about my food, but it seems like that's the only way to do it.
Or, you know, I don't really want a six-pack.
I don want to, I'm not inspired by that, but that's everywhere I look.

(03:18):
I see six-packs.
I just want my pants to fit.
These folks aren't
Vain or disordered.
They're just humans and human bodies seeking some relief from a persistent weight gain.

So the real question I always think about becomes (03:30):
can we support weight loss without replicating harm?
Can we program for body change?
Contemplating the human's lived experience without making our clients feel broken, ashamed, or super microm? And the answer

(03:50):
is yes, but it requires better programming and you kind of have to think outside the box a little.
Here's what most weight loss coaching looks like.
We start with the outcome in mind to lose 20 pounds or six weeks, summer shred, or whatever it might be.
You know, new year, new you.
Then we reverse engineer a protocol.
So eat this, move this way, do these habits, and then we expect compliance.

(04:14):
And when the client struggles, we assume they're the problem.
It's a coach-centered model.
It is a coach-centered model based on outcomes, and it's not a client-centered model.
It's focused on math instead of
Signal feeling, you know, just do this.
Here's your numbers, here's your macros, go do it, go execute.

(04:34):
There's no sort of feelings of safety or
execution involved there.
It's focused more on restriction instead of nourishment.
It's focused more on compliance rather than collaboration.
That's a big one for me.
The hidden harm is that it chips away at the client's trust in themselves.
It teaches them that they're not to be trusted with food.

(04:55):
They don't know how to eat.
I've literally had clients say, I don't know how to eat.
That's the part we have to change.
Why on earth don't clients know how to eat?
Unfortunately, the industry, we created that in our clients.
So let's take an ethical approach to this, a human person-centered approach.

(05:18):
to programming.
Let's talk about what ethical programming actually looks like.
As far as I'm concerned, there's about four pillars based into
Person-centric ethical weight loss programming.
And again, extrapolate this to your category as needed.
Number one is autonomy.
The clients need to feel that this is their choice, not your protocol that they're blindly following.

(05:40):
Not a copy-paste plan.
This is about their values, their pace, their schedule, their preferences, their family, their food beliefs, everything.
Have you ever followed a plan that felt like someone else's life?
Well, that's a sign that the plan didn't honor autonomy, and those plans always fail.
For me, this is my personal bias.

(06:01):
A big one of these is meal plans.
or macro plans.
They just feel a little too rigid, and then the person has to fit their life into the plan.
Rather than the other way around.
I think for certain industries that's necessary.
So, like bodybuilders, like extreme body recomposition.
Again, I'm
I'm couching this in the context of weight loss, body recomposition, fat loss.

(06:26):
If you are a bodybuilder trying to get on stage for a show or a photo shoot, then yes, we have to fit our lives into the plan.
But most of us, I think.
Are working with just regular, normal people for whom the plan has to fit into their life.
So you have to offer options.
You have to be flexible.
Ask them what they're willing to try.

(06:47):
Let them choose.
be nimble with your quote unquote prescription so that the client can have their own unique exper in the program. Your
program might have parameters. It has
to have parameters. You have
to have some basic
Concepts for the client to anchor to and execute on.
And then those parameters have to fit into the life of the individual in front of you.

(07:11):
So.
This is the co-creation process that I talk about a lot.
And the co-creation process builds buy-in, and buy-in is what we need for absolute success in weight loss and health.
Second factor, second pillar is people need to feel capable or competent, especially if they've tried and failed before, which most weight loss consumers have.

(07:33):
So in order to have a client feel competent at weight loss, we need to choose or co create strategies that match their real life, as I mentioned a second ago.
We definitely want to work on celebrating the early wins, the quick wins.
I think it's important in any kind of health coaching program that your clients do get some kind of quick win because that's really motivating.

(07:54):
But the thing is, you might have to teach them that the wins that they get are maybe not the wins they expect.
This is the difference between process and outcome goals.
So the outcome goal might be losing 2 pounds, but the process goal might be, oh, I snacked less last week, or my sugar craving seemed quieter, or I cooked three dinners at home instead of ordering DoorDash, right?
You also want to reframe failure as a data point.

(08:16):
So failure is simply a data point.
It's one of these bridges we have to cross.
It's not a personal flaw.
Nobody is screwing up.
You really can't screw this up.

It's one of the phrases I like to tell my clients (08:25):
like, you can't screw this up because if they believe they can screw it up, then they're going to screw it up.
And in terms of feeling comp, you have to know how to get back on track. It's
one of the key components of competence that is missing in many weight loss programs.
And most women I work with have what I refer to as a competence wound.
They've been on the merry-go-round of failure for so long, all they remember is the times they failed.

(08:49):
They don't believe they can change.
So your job is to prove them wrong.
Gently by showing them the confidence they're building, the skills they're developing.
I really do think, especially again with women, and please extrapolate accordingly into the category that you work in.
They truly believe that there is no success available to them.

(09:15):
They feel utterly incompetent.
So we have to factor competence in.
So really, really
encouraging and celebrating and languaging the quick wins.
I always tell my clients that fat loss is actually a lagging indicator of the work we do, and the leading indicators are things like
Improved energy, better sleep, cravings are quieter, maybe a little water weight loss.

(09:35):
Like we going to have all these little quick wins up front.
And we want to just gently, without cheerleading, celebrate those wins, acknowledge the wins so they can feel a sense of competence, which will get them to keep going until they get to the top of the staircase and achieve the weight loss goal.
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The third pillar is safety, sort of physiological and psychological safety.
And I really geek out on this because there is a psychos component to
rel with food, to dieting. So there

(11:28):
's a physiological aspect to changing food behaviors to get the outcome of fat loss, but there's also the psychos piece, which is here's how I've been trained my whole life to eat and think about food.
So remember that the human body is not a math equation.
It's more like a surveillance system.
And it's constantly asking, is it safe to let go of this stored energy right now?

(11:50):
Right.
So fat loss being a liberation of energy from storage, there has to be a safety to that.
So if your client is restricting heavily, overe,
I'm chronically stressed out, terrified of food generally, just very, very hyper-vigilant and worried about failing, then it doesn't feel safe.
And the nervous system doesn't like that.

(12:11):
And when the nervous system is sort of kind of circling the wagons and protecting the body, well, fat loss is just going to be a little harder physiologically.
So, I think a big part of fat loss programming, weight loss programming is safety.

So, that might be (12:25):
let's talk about what you can add into your diet.
Instead of increasing exercise, let's change the type of exercise you're doing.
Let's fit it into your schedule, softening the approach, really softening it, having it just sort of melt into the available
Spaces in a person's life, you know, there's this sort of grid.

(12:48):
I'm visualizing a grid, the grid of competence.
Again, we're going back to competence here.
There's sort of like at first you don't know what you don't know, right?
Then you know what you don't know, then you know what you know, and then you don't know what you know.
So that's the unconscious confidence we're
And I think to get people.
To that point, they have to be able to feel safe executing, safe and comfortable making the executions in their day-to-day life.

(13:18):
Rather than having a program that feels very fraught, where I have to really overthink this and fit it in and make it work, it's like, oh, this just melts into the little spaces that already exist in my life.
I don't have to exert a ton more energy mentally or otherwise to
Facilitate this, it feels safe, it feels easy.
Actually, I really do like the idea of weight loss feeling easy.

(13:38):
This is one of my current crusades in my social media feed, which is
Actually, weight loss should feel easy, not hard.
Because if it feels hard, then it feels too quitt. If
it feels easy, then it feels safe, and easy feels fast, actually.
Safety, ease, effortlessness, these are all the I think these factors have to be brought into a weight loss program.

(14:01):
Now again,
You might be the kind of coach who does an aggressive dieting for extreme body recomposition, which is absolutely a needed market.
I mean, we got people who are shredding for the wedding out here.
They need to have some kind of aggressive, you know, three-month fat loss extravaganza.
which is fine.
Actually, I'm not coming down on the short term crash diet type thing because I do think the industry kind of needs that.

(14:23):
I do.
I really do.
I'm not even kidding you.
I guess I'm thinking of this from the perspective of like long-term fat loss.
And again, I work with women who have this sort of wounding around diet programming.
They've been at it for three decades.
So I do think about this a little differently.
So once again, please understand this is sort of an anecdote based on my experience in weight loss.
You know, modify and extrapolate accordingly.

(14:44):
The fourth pillar, though, is individuality.
And this is where programming comes in.
And this is where you always hear like a cookie cutter approach won't work, and it really won't.
The thing is, again, I said earlier, your program will have parameters, it will have concepts.
And tactics for your client to execute.
But then the client comes into that container, and now we're in co-creation mode.

(15:06):
Let's take these parameters and fit them into your life.
So, what season of life are they in?
Some of their root-cause behaviors or feelings or beliefs that's causing weight gain?
Do they have medical stuff they have to work through?
Like, you, I'm working with this midlife.
Female who's going through the menopause transition.
Well, do you have a good doctor to work on that with, right?
Can I help you find one?

(15:28):
Can I help you have that conversation, right?
Every human is having a different lived experience.
This is the lived experience of the human.
And the weight loss plan must be different, and it must factor in the human's lived experience.
So let's walk through what this could look like in action.
A client comes in and says, I've gained 25 pounds since COVID.
I eat clean, I walk every day, but nothing works.

(15:50):
This is probably one of the most common sound bit I hear. First
of, the weight gains since COVID. So,
five years ago, as I'm recording this.
COVID didn't cause weight gain.
Changes in behavior or physiology or psychosocial aspects cause weight gain, but COVID lockdowns didn't cause weight gain.
And people always say, I eat clean, I exercise, I don't know what's going on.
So, the old model would say, this sort of non-client-centric, more coach-centric model would, I'm going to need you to keep a food journal.

(16:16):
You're going to track your food.
You're going to submit that to me.
Then I'm going to give back to you a calorie range you're going to shoot for, then you going to track your food.
rep back to me. We
're going to do this sort of inter style back and forth sort I'm I'm trying not to use the word relationship because it doesn't feel like a relationship to me. In fact, when
I get on consultations with clients and I ask them, what have you tried before?
They'll say, Well, I worked with a macro coach for a while, which is great.

(16:38):
There's some awesome macro coaches out there.
And I will say, Tell me what that relationship was like.
And they'll say, Well, you know, every two weeks I had to email them my food journal, and then they would adjust my macros and email it back to me.
And that's not a relationship.
Now, if the macro coach is having a conversation with the client about how or why they're missing the mark, hitting the mark, what's going on in your life, is there some adjustment we can make here so that this will work for you?

(17:01):
Then there's coaching involved.
But in a lot of these sort of again, the clipboard sort of wielding teaching-telling approach to coaching, where you're dispensing the plan.
and not factoring the client in, it just simply doesn't work, not in the long term.
But so the more client-centric model asks you to zoom out.
Tell me what your day is like.
What time do you wake up?

(17:21):
What time do you have to leave the house for work?
Where do you work?
Do you work in an office?
Is there a grocery store nearby?
Do you have a kitchen?
Get into the absolute weeds.
Get into the absolute weeds of how they're going to execute the food changes they need to make to get fat loss, because weight loss comes down to how you eat ultimately.
So, how are we going to execute these food changes?

(17:42):
I have a client right now who doesn't eat beef, pork, or eggs, will only eat fish and chicken.
So, I'm going to make her eat beef.
No, she won't eat it.
So, we have to adjust the plan with just chicken and fish.
That's her preference.
That may change.
I don't know.
But in the meantime, right now, we have to have a chicken and fish forward.
Sort of meal program so that she can succeed, right?

(18:04):
Let's zoom out.
Let's see about how you're sleeping, how you're stressing, what else is going on in your day, what else is going on in your life.
And then we begin this gentle collaborative experimentation.
So let's try this.
Let's try having a big breakfast.
This is one of my favorite tactics, is the big protein for breakfast.
Let's get up in the morning when you feel your first hunger.
Have a breakfast.

(18:24):
Give that a try.
Could you try that?
Let's talk about how that could look over the next week.
What days this week could you do that?
What would the breakfast consist of?
Do you have this food in your fridge?
Do you have to go buy it?
Then report back.
How did that go?
We have this little check-in, right?
We have the check-ins, we have the conversations.
Did you succeed?
Why or why not?
No problem.
Should we try this?
Let's thin some wrenches on this and try it again.

(18:45):
So every single coaching conversation ends up with some kind of values-oriented goal for the client to go off and execute.
But ultimately, this comes down to
We're running a casual experiment here, and then you're going to come back and we're going to talk about what we learned on this experiment.
So we run the experiment, we collect the data, right?
I think this is beautiful because it takes the extreme rigidness out of it and lets the client move with the plan.

(19:10):
And that's really essential because I think people can stick to a rigid plan.
To a certain extent.
It could be three days, it could be three weeks.
I don know.
It could be three months.
But for the most part, people are going to tap out of it because it feels very low in self-determination.
which is an episode I released a couple of weeks ago here on the podcast.

(19:30):
Self-determination theory is this idea of like feeling autonomous, feeling confident, feeling related to the process.
And unfortunately, rigid programs that the client has to really white knuckle themselves through undermine self-determination.
So
This to me is what ethical programming looks like.
Now even if you're not a weight loss coach, I feel like this applies to you because every client in every niche has a story and ethical, client forward, person centric

(20:00):
Programming means you listen first, you co-create second, and you program based on the full human, their lived experience, their schedule, their preferences, their life.
not just the desired outcome.
So good coaching is client forward.
It is a co-creation.
It builds competence.
It helps them develop skills.

(20:21):
And a real transformation happens when people feel safe, they feel seen, and they feel supported.

So that's my take (20:27):
a person forward, body honoring.
Results respecting approach to weight loss and coaching in general.
And if this resonated with you, let me know.
I love hearing from other coaches who are doing.
This kind of work and other kinds of work.
Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time on Health Coach Radio.
This podcast was brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute.

(20:48):
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