PERCEPTION MATTERS - WE DON’T WANT TO LOSE
NUTRITION COUNSELING TIPS:
#1: UNDERSTAND THAT YOU CAN’T CHANGE someone’s BEHAVIOR, BUT YOU CAN MAKE IT EASIER FOR THEM TO MAKE CHANGES.
Facilitate - /fəˈ-silə-tāt/ [def]: make (an action or process) easy or easier.
Our goal as health professionals is to successfully facilitate health behavior changes. We know that we can not change someone's behavior, but we can make it easier for them to make healthy changes.
One of the best ways to make it easier for individuals to choose healthy habits is to primarily focus on ADDING MORE HEALTHY HABITS into their lives rather than concentrating on decreasing unhealthy habits. Although our hope is that they will decrease these unhealthy habits, we put people on the defensive if we mainly focus on the habits that they currently enjoy and don't want to lose.
By getting people to focus primarily on adding good things that will help their health, it helps them to start to see improvements without the sense of loss. Once those improvements occur, often the individual will choose to decrease the unhealthy habits without additional prompting
Focus on:
Creating a positive ratio of change. Have the client add a higher ratio of new additions to a health behavior or increasing the intensity or duration of current health behaviors that they already have success.
Making a subtraction or a decrease in a behavior less of the focus of the conversation than adding healthy things. Shine the light on the behaviors that they are doing well.
#2: HELP YOUR CLIENTS TO UNDERSTAND WHY IT IS TOUGH TO MAKE CHANGES to BEHAVIORS THAT THEY ACTUALLY LOVE, EVEN THOUGH IT ISN’T GOOD FOR THEIR PHYSICAL HEALTH.
Often bringing attention to how our minds work helps people to make sense of why some changes are harder than others.
If they can learn to perceive healthy behaviors as a gain and the reduction of unhealthy behaviors also as a gain they will be able to work with their brain to make those changes easier.
It is when we fight against our nature and feel guilt or shame about not being able to change something that we really want to stay the same. That mental load is too heavy and if we can change our relationship with that change then we may be able to make that change easier.
It is your job to help individuals to have grace with themselves in this process, because change is hard, especially changing/losing the things that we may love so much.
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