Nutrition Coaching 101 (A Beginner's Guide To Nutrition Coaching)

Anyone can be a nutrition coach, but I’ve been working in this field the last 12 years, teaching and certifying coaches for the last 5 and here’s what I’ve noticed.

Personally in my own nutrition coaching training, The Dr. Marc Method, we’ve seen 80% of our students are made up of two main groups.

1) Someone with a personal transformation story that wants to give back, and help people through the power of nutrition. (In the same way they’ve been helped.)

2) OR a fitness professional (like personal trainer, strength coach or group fitness instructor). Typically these people have audiences and clients that want these services, so it makes sense for everyone to offer it.

The remaining 20% are typically people in health care roles (nurses, doctors and rehab professionals).

But if you have a passion for nutrition and helping others improve their health, and you have an extra 5 hours per week, you can help 10 people and make an extra $2,000 per month.

Nutrition coaching methods vary based on coaches' backgrounds, experiences, and personal philosophies. The coaching style, goals, and beliefs of each coach influence how they coach their clients.

But here’s how most coaches do it:

Prescriptive Approaches:

Some coaches use specific methods like meal plans and macronutrient prescriptions. This can be challenging for you and your clients because meal plans are hard to stick to, don’t help your clients learn about nutrition and how their body responds to different foods, and it puts more responsibility on you if your client faces any health problems from the plan you gave them. 

Because of this, many coaches opt for a more flexible approach. They prescribe food levels or calories and macronutrients based on the client’s needs and goals, and structure their plan off of that. Flexible Dieting offers effectiveness, education, and freedom in food choices.

Alternative Approaches:

Beyond prescriptive methods, some coaches focus on habits, behavior change, and mindfulness in their clients’ nutrition. Habit-based approaches and Intuitive Eating, without a focus on changing body composition, have been gaining popularity.

Coaches fall on a spectrum between restrictive and freedom-oriented methods. Choosing an approach aligned with philosophy attracts like-minded clients. The most successful coaches choose one approach and coach a majority of their clients using that approach.

While there are philosophical differences when it comes to nutrition coaching, it’s still a results-based business. Coaches need systems for prescribing macro and calorie levels to monitor client progress. Having these systems makes it easier to track progress over time, which ultimately will bring your business more success because your client can see how they’ve made progress over time.

So how do you actually deliver your coaching to clients?

Every 7 days on a pre-scheduled day (i.e. your on Monday check-ins), the coach will collect some predetermined data, like body weight averages (ideally collected at the same time and under similar conditions) so they can assess trends. But also any performance metrics, from the gym or sports.

And some subjective feedback on hunger, energy levels, sleep and stress (usually with sliding scales like (1 - 5) or (1 - 10), so these metrics can be compared weekly).

All of this information allows the coach to track progress, and feedback on how the client is doing. They also measure adherence, which is how well the client is sticking to the plan.

From there they make adjustments to the plan. These can be to food levels - meaning taking food away, adding food in, from a calorie, macronutrient but also food choice perspective. Most coaches don’t make these changes too frequently, because they need to give it enough time to truly see progress.

But what happens more frequently is the coach will make suggestions to improve adherence or remove barriers to success. This is the art of coaching. Getting a client to stick to things, motivating them to take action in bite size steps.

Usually this feedback will be returned within 24 hours of the check-in being submitted. Most of the time this is done through email, so the client doesn’t need to “meet” with the coach.

From there, the client and coach may go back and forth a few times for clarity.

We have actually created a check-in process that does all of this within 5- minutes.

It gets better results for our student’s clients, in a quarter of the time, and CLIENTS RAVE about the service.

If you want a free training on the “HYBRID” check-in, Click Here to check it out.

The “week” timeframe is the sweet spot for this process. It gives enough time for the client to try out the plan and assess if it’s working, and not too much time that both parties aren’t close to the process.