GGS FREE 5-DAY MENOPAUSE & NUTRITION COURSE

Day 2: How to Coach New Nutrition Skills:

A 5-Step Formula for Success

Alright, Coach! You’re working with a new client, and she wants some nutri-
tion help.

Maybe she wants to lose weight. Maybe she wants more energy. Maybe her
sleep is a drag, and she’d love to get a good night’s rest… without all the heart-
burn.

Here’s the good news.

In your free five-day course, you’re learning powerful nutrition strategies

tailored to women in menopause. Today, you learned how to help if your
client is interested in weight management. Over the next few days, you’ll learn
how to help with sleep, hot flushes, and brain fog.

All of these strategies can help her manage her symptoms, reach her goals,
and better support her overall health during the menopause transition.

But if you’re new to coaching nutrition, you might not know exactly where
to start when it comes to helping your client tackle new skills — and stay
consistent with the changes.

In this bonus resource, you’ll learn our five-step formula to coach new
nutrition strategies and set her up for success.

(Hint: This coaching approach — a small taste of the curriculum in our GGS
Menopause Coaching Specialist Certification — can be applied to any of the
nutrition strategies you’ll learn throughout this course… and just about any-
thing, really. Feel free to use it with your clients when working other kinds of
skills and behavior change too!)

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 Day 2: How to Coach New Nutrition Skills: A 5-Step Formula for Success

Step #1: Pick One Strategy to Start With

That’s right. Pick one thing — not all the things. (You could maybe try two
complementary skills, if your client is super duper inspired and confident
about making the change.)

Big changes or kitchen overhauls are fun to imagine, but they usually aren’t
sustainable. When you focus on one change (or maybe two) at a time, you give
your client time to get the hang of a particular strategy, see how it works for
her, and then add to it.

From today’s lesson, you have four skills to choose from:

o Recognize the difference between hunger and appetite.

o Eat slowly and mindfully.

o Eat enough protein.

o Consume more minimally processed foods.

We suggest you tackle these strategies in order, starting with recognizing the
difference between hunger and appetite, but you can mix them up if you like.

If you decide to go out of order (or if you’re tackling strategies we outline on

other days of the course), considering starting with the strategy that:

o Feels like an immediate easy win for your client. (e.g., “Oh, that’s
easy, I can totally do that!”)
o Is a high-impact behavior, especially considering her unique
symptoms and goals. For example, eating slowly and mindfully is
a high-impact behavior for most women, as it can help with weight
management, food satisfaction, gastrointestinal symptoms, bloating,
sleep (by reducing heartburn), and so on.

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 Day 2: How to Coach New Nutrition Skills: A 5-Step Formula for Success

You may need to explore your client’s current behaviors to figure out the best
place to start.

For example, if you have a conversation about her meals and what’s going
on around her while she eats, and she lets you know that she almost always
eats in a rush while running between meetings… slow and mindful eating
would likely be a valuable practice for her. That said, you’ve also identified
some obstacles to this practice (like all those meetings)! Together, you can
brainstorm possible solutions and ways to make the behavior easier.

Optionally, you could also invite your client to track her meals or her current
eating behaviors (e.g., where is she eating, how long do her meals take) for a
few days, so you can get a better understanding of her baseline. Then, review
the data together. This will give you a clear idea of her starting point, making
it easier to identify progress.

Step #2: Turn the Strategy into a Specific Behavior

Now that she’s selected a strategy, work together to choose a specific behavior
that will help her turn that strategy into action.

Just think: While it’s all well and good to decide you want to eat more protein
— it doesn’t mean it’s easy to practice. You need to find new recipes, change
how you grocery shop, potentially give yourself more time to prepare meals,
and so on. By honing in on a specific behavior within the target strategy, you
can make things a heck of a lot more tangible and easy to stick with.

For example, “eating more protein” might become “keep protein powder in
the pantry and hard-boiled eggs and pre-cooked rotisserie chicken in the
fridge, and add at least one serving of protein to one meal per day.”

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 Day 2: How to Coach New Nutrition Skills: A 5-Step Formula for Success

See how much more specific that is? It’s also a lot easier to identify success.

It can help to brainstorm a bunch of possible options with your client. Let’s
consider another example of how that might look. If she wants to eat more
slowly and mindfully, she might choose one of the following specific behaviors:

o Notice the first and last bite at breakfast.

o Put her fork down at least three times during lunch.

o Divide her plate in half at the beginning of dinner, and tune in to how
she feels and how the food tastes at the halfway point.
o Set a time for five minutes at the beginning of dinner, and take a two-
minute eating intermission when the timer goes off. After two minutes,
she can continue eating.
o Set a timer at each meal, and extend the length of dinner by five minutes
beyond her standard baseline (as identified in the previous step).

In addition to choosing behaviors, help your client decide how often she wants
to do them. For example, is she doing the behavior at every single meal? At
one meal a day? A certain number of days per week?

Once you’ve brainstormed several variations together, invite her to choose

one that feels doable, realistic, and appealing. If she had to rank her confi-
dence in her ability to complete this new behavior over an extended period of
time, she should be able to say she’s a 9 or 10 out of 10.

Remember: The goal is to define specific, clear behaviors that she can practice.
There’s no guessing involved — she’ll definitely know if she’s done them, or not.

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 Day 2: How to Coach New Nutrition Skills: A 5-Step Formula for Success

Pro tip: As mentioned earlier, sometimes the simple act of tracking

meals or behaviors for a few days can illuminate potential obstacles
down the road.

Even if potential difficulties aren’t immediately clear, though, it’s worth

spending five minutes with your client to look ahead. Change is hard —
even if the behavior might sound easy!

So, what roadblocks might interfere with her ability to practice this new
behavior? How will each of you respond when that happens? What can
she do now to prepare for these challenges?

By anticipating some potential obstacles, you’ll both be better prepared

to meet them when they come (or even avoid some altogether).

Step #3: Take Action

Once your client has selected the behavior she wants to practice, encourage
her to start doing.

As she practices, invite her to track her efforts. Give her the GGS 28-Day
Consistency Tracker, and ask her to check off each day she completes her task.
For example, if she’s supposed to eat one serving of protein at dinner each day,
she can simply check off each day she completed her goal.

We typically recommend tracking for at least two weeks before evaluating

success. (More on this in a moment.)

When inviting your client to use this tracker, be clear that your goal is not to
judge or make sure she does everything perfectly. It’s really about collecting

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 Day 2: How to Coach New Nutrition Skills: A 5-Step Formula for Success

data so you can make informed choices together and decide if the behavior
needs to be scaled up or down.

As your client works on her behavior goal, be ready to troubleshoot or collab-

orate if needed. If she gets tripped up or loses motivation, no problem — that’s
what you’re there for. Much of your work as a coach is about helping your
client take action, even when she feels stuck.

Pro tip: If your client is struggling to take action, try the five minute
trick. (And yes, it’s really as easy as it sounds!)

If she feels stuck, invite her to set a timer for five minutes. During that
time period, all she needs to do is take one small action that moves her
toward her goals. That’s it.

For example, if her goal is to eat more minimally processed foods,

maybe she eats a banana. Or, if her goal is to recognize the difference
between hunger and appetite, maybe she tunes in to her body for a
moment and ranks her hunger level on a scale of 1–10. There are lots of
options here.

This is a great way to help her make progress and remind her that she’s
in the driver’s seat.

Step #4: Evaluate How It’s Going

Before adding on any additional behaviors or strategies (or making her
existing behavior more difficult), confirm that your client achieved at least
80% consistency with her initial behavior goal for at least two weeks.

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 Day 2: How to Coach New Nutrition Skills: A 5-Step Formula for Success

You can calculate consistency by dividing the total number of times she
engaged in an activity by the total number of times she was meant to engage
in that activity.

For example, if her behavior goal was to eat a serving of protein at dinner at
least five nights a week, and she ate protein at dinner for three nights that
week, you can calculate: 3 divided by 5 = 0.6. That means she’s been 60%
consistent that week.

Gathering objective data on her consistency with new behaviors is a critical

part of your evaluation process. By looking at outcomes, you can see what’s
actually working and if something needs to be changed. For example, if she
only hit 60% consistency, it’s likely a sign that you need to scale things back,
make the behavior easier, help remove a barrier preventing her from being
more consistent, or brainstorm a solution that could increase her consistency.

That said, you’ll also want to gather more subjective data from your client.
Check in often to see how she feels about the new behavior:

o Does she feel good about it?

o Is it mentally draining or difficult?

o How confident does she feel about adopting this new pattern in her life?

As you go forward, encourage her to be flexible. (And that’s good advice for
you too, Coach!) If she’s having trouble doing the behavior or doesn’t feel
confident about adopting it, you can course-correct as needed.

Step #5: Determine the Next Step

Once you’ve evaluated how things are going with your client and her new
behavior, it’s time to determine what comes next.

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 Day 2: How to Coach New Nutrition Skills: A 5-Step Formula for Success

Next steps won’t always be linear; they’re going to depend on the client. But
here are a few options.

If your client has hit at least 80% consistency with her new behavior for at
least two weeks, you can:

o Stick with the same behavior, but increase the challenge. For
example, if your client mastered eating a serving of protein at dinner
five nights a week, maybe she now aims to eat a serving of protein at
lunch too.
o Choose a new behavior (within the same strategy) to tackle. Go back
to the list of possible behaviors you and your client brainstormed back
in Step #2. Repeat the steps, choosing a new behavior goal. For example,
let’s say your client is working on consuming more minimally processed
foods. She’s successfully swapped her fast-food breakfast for something
less processed, like plain Greek yogurt and fresh berries. Now, maybe
she tries adding a serving of vegetables to her dinner plate, or having a
salad with lunch.
o Try a new strategy. If your client feels that she has gained enough
competence with one strategy (or she’s given it a fair shake and wants to
move on to something new), choose a different strategy. As mentioned,
we recommend doing these strategies in order, if possible. So if your
client feels she’s gotten a handle on the difference between hunger and
appetite (Strategy #1), she may now choose to practice eating slowly and
mindfully (Strategy #2). Once again, follow Steps #1–5.

As you go, remember to call out and celebrate progress often and always.
Change isn’t easy. So acknowledge your client’s effort at every stage.

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