If you’ve been with Precision Nutrition for awhile, you’ll find we use one phrase a lot:
How much protein do you need? It depends.
Is wine bad for you? Depends.
Should I eat more broccoli? Also… depends.
Why does so much depend? Because: No one finding applies to all people in all situations all the time.
We know this from science: Younger people have different protein needs than older people. Wine poses different health risks to men than it does to women. Broccoli is a great veggie choice for most people, but turns others into a fart factory.
So when considering any research finding—positive or negative—always ask: When is this true? And when isn’t this true? People are unique, and context matters.
Tool #4: Use experiments to test ideas.
Every year, our Precision Nutrition coaches encounter a few clients desperate to lose the last few pounds.
And often those last few pounds are based on a number from…long ago. (Maybe their wedding day weight. Or their pre-pandemic weight.)
Thing is, in addition to body weight creeping up, lots of other things have changed over the years. Like how much time someone has to devote to exercise, or how much control someone has over cookies entering the house.
Which can make that long-ago scale number a lot harder to reach.
They long for that “magic” number, but “they’re either unable to do the incredibly hard work of restricting that much—or they DO restrict a lot and still don’t lose those last few pounds,” says Precision Nutrition coach Pam Ruhland.
To these clients, Ruhland often suggests a counterintuitive experiment: Part with the scale for a month.
Surprise: Ruhland’s clients often emerge transformed, telling her, “I thought I needed to lose more weight. But I’m actually happy where I am.”
At Precision Nutrition, our coaches use experiments like the above a lot—because they help clients test strongly held beliefs that may or may not actually be true for them.
Beliefs like:
“I’ll only be happy if I have a six-pack.”
“If I let myself get too hungry, I’ll eat the whole fridge.”
“This supplement is going to fix everything.”
The only way to find out if these beliefs are true, is to test them. To do so, use this advice, from Cosgrove:
✓ Know what you’re measuring, and get a baseline. Are you measuring happiness? Sleep quality? Body composition? Record your starting point, so you have something to compare to later on.
✓ Change ONE thing at a time. Scientists call this “controlling variables,” and it helps you to know what actually worked (or didn’t). So, don’t take the supplement and start doubling down on your hill sprints.
✓ Wait at least two to three weeks. Clients may step on their scale tomorrow and decide, “It’s not working! NEXT!” But caution them: It usually takes a few weeks for any intervention to have an effect.
✓ Consider graphing your data. Sometimes change isn’t perfectly linear. (Good days and bad days, you know?) Graphing helps you see visually whether things are (overall) improving, staying the same, or getting worse.
Tool #5: Use failure as feedback—and not as evidence of your worthlessness.
It’s pretty rare for any scientific discovery to take place without a long, arduous process of elimination.
Katalin Karikó is a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Back in the 1990s, when she wanted to study how messenger RNA could be used to fight disease, no one would fund her.
No one believed her idea could work.
Undeterred, she spent decades doing experiments, most of which taught her one thing: how not to use mRNA to fight disease.
These failures proved enormously valuable: They eventually led to vaccines that have been key in fighting COVID-19.
Nutrition coaching is a similar process.
It’s frustrating when a series of actions fail to help a client move forward. But it’s precisely this process of elimination that helps clients figure out the practices that work—for them.
The more they try and test, the more they personalize nutrition, fitness, and health actions for their body, goals, and life.
To embrace this process of figuring out what works (often through valuable failure), use the 6-steps we teach our Level 1 certification students:
1. Assess and gather data.
What are your client’s goals, needs, and skills? In other words, who are they, what can they do, and what do they want? Include any baseline measurements for variables you want to track.
2. Understand and explore.
Be curious about your client’s background, story, and situation. Get to know them as a whole person, and build their trust. (Tip: Talk like a “true expert,” as mentioned above.)
3. Strategize and plan.
Hypothesize what might work most effectively for your client (based on what you uncovered in steps 1 and 2). Then, draft a plan to test that hypothesis.
4. Choose one action to try.
Drawing from the plan you’ve drafted, give your client some options, then let them choose their next action. Make sure this action is meaningful to them, and that they feel confident about their ability to do it.
5. Observe and monitor.
How well is your client able to do the thing? And how consistently? What are you and your client learning? Record how your client does, and any new information you learn about them.
6. Analyze and evaluate.
Assess how things went, based on both successes and failures. (Remember, it’s all useful feedback.) Use what you discover during this step to choose another action to move your client closer to their goal, and return to step 3.
It’s by embracing this never-ending step-by-step loop that our coaches eventually reframe failure.
Instead of labeling mistakes or lack of client results as “I’m a sorry excuse for a coach,” they come to believe: “I need to fail to learn from my mistakes.”
Feel the fear—and use science anyway.
We want you to know: It’s normal to doubt yourself, especially…
early in your coaching career
when facing a challenging client or situation
when you’re not sure if your advice is actually going to work.
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This article originally appeared on the Precision Nutrition blog and has been published here with permission
Alisa Bowman is a Precision Nutrition writer and editor