Last week, I saw a woman on social media saying that she would never take fat loss advice from a coach who’s never needed to lose weight.
Her rationale being that if someone has never lived in a large(r) body, they aren’t qualified to give expert advice on how to lose it or keep it off. They simply don’t know what it’s like to be in those shoes.
And I started to think about a variety of coaches I know who actively coach fat loss for their clients:
-There are coaches who used to weigh much more than they currently do, found a way to lose that weight and maintain that loss, and want to inspire others to do the same.
-There are coaches whose only experience being in a large(r) body comes from the weight they gained when they were pregnant and they use their experience of post-partum fat loss to help inspire others to get the body they want.
-There are others who grew up as athletes and maybe went through bulking and cutting protocols to make weight for certain events. They also try to use that experience to help them coach fat loss clients.
-Some coaches have never lived in large(r) bodies but have spent years taking on fat loss clients, learning what methods and tips help their clients to succeed and try to spread that word out to others.
-And then you might have coaches like me, who’ve never lived in large(r) bodies but have struggled with maladaptive behaviors like drug/alcohol abuse or addictions and found a way to see common ground between people who abused substances and people who abuse/misuse food intake.
If you’re someone who has struggled with fat loss for most of your life, it may be difficult to find people who understand your own personal struggle.
Many of these struggles are multi-factorial: they come from emotional dysregulation, perhaps unsupportive family members/loved ones, a lack of coping mechanisms when times are difficult, poverty or certain medical challenges.
I can remember during the ten years that I struggled with addiction, that drugs were there for every reason I needed them: happiness, sadness, boredom, frustration, feelings of celebration and feelings of despair.
For every emotion (or lack thereof), drugs were there to get me through.
Until they weren’t…until I made the decision to find other ways to work through my emotions and drugs were no longer the option.
However, at no point during those ten years did I seek out or find my best inspiration to quit from people who were former addicts and got clean.
I’m not saying their stories weren’t inspirational (they were) but it wasn’t former addicts who gave me the best advice.
It was people who had never been addicts to begin with.
My best inspiration came from the people who found healthier ways to cope with life, who saw life from a lens that an addict like me hadn’t considered.
However, asking other people to think like me or be motivated by the same types of inspiration is a recipe for disaster.
In the comment section of that woman’s original post, many coaches responded by listing how long they had been coaching fat loss clients, how many pounds they had helped people shed, what certifications they had, etc.
It didn’t make the woman change her mind, rather she stood her ground, dug her heels in and stayed true to her original sentiment.
I will credit her in this way: She absolutely has a right to be comfortable with whomever she chooses to help her reach her goals. If the person who lights that path is also a coach who has “been there, done that”, I think it’s awesome.
It can be easy to forget or overlook that hiring a coach is very much relationship-driven: If you believe this person respects you, hears you, meets you where you’re at and can pivot with advice in real time, then you’re already several steps closer to your goal.
Truth is, any of those coach examples I provided above can be a great resource for fat loss information or a terrible one. It depends on the coach and it depends on the coaching relationship.
And while the original post might have been a bit inflammatory, there’s also the chance that the woman who wrote it had been burned by people who had not lived an experience closer to hers. In my mind, it might feel like taking parenting advice from someone who’s never been a parent before.
But on that note, sometimes the best inspiration to succeed, to do better and be better, can come from the most unlikely of places…
(Photo courtesy of AllGo)
