Turning Knowledge Into Action: How Longevity Coaches Keep You Accountable
As we learn more about ways to prolong and improve our lives, health coaches are becoming increasingly popular as a means to achieve a healthier lifestyle.
Longevity coaches are a subcategory of health coaches who work within our Longevity Program. They work directly with the longevity physician, strength and conditioning coach, and most importantly, their patients to build a holistic plan that considers life constraints. This ensures that the plan remains attainable and realistic for the patient rather than feeling overwhelming and unachievable. Longevity coaches emphasize health education and sprinkling insight on health behaviours a patient might not have known to take control of their health. The objective is not only to improve your lifespan, but to improve your healthspan too (that is, the amount of time you are healthy throughout life).
Longevity coaches help in all areas of life, including (but not limited to):
Nutrition
Sleep
Stress Resiliency
Accountability & Support
As part of the Longevity Program, their role is to make you successful in achieving your goals and supporting your health journey by providing ongoing support and kindly nudging you forward when you are struggling to be consistent (don’t worry, it happens to the best of us).
Diet and Longevity
In essence, every meal is an opportunity to invest in your future. Prioritizing whole, unprocessed foods isn’t just about looking and feeling better today—it’s about setting yourself up for decades of health and vitality. At this point, it is fairly common knowledge that eating healthy foods has a wide range of benefits on your body, mind and longevity. However, nutrition is highly nuanced, and each person has different preferences, needs, and goals. This is where a longevity coach can help.
Here is what we know about nutrition:
Eating adequate protein per day helps to stabilize your blood sugar, supports muscle growth and maintenance, and keeps you full.
Eating adequate fiber per day supports cholesterol, blood sugar, and weight management and optimizes your gut microbiome.
Consistently prioritizing real, whole foods over packaged, manufactured foods that we know are abundantly available in our society is one of the most important things we can do for majority of our health markers. However, making these choices are much harder in reality.
A longevity coach specializes in optimizing your diet to boost your health metrics and bring you closer to reaching your goals while considering your needs. They can help you adopt a whole foods diet, educate you on your daily macronutrient needs, help implement supportive behaviours like meal planning, cooking more at home, making heatlhier food swaps, overcoming setbacks —while also providing education and resources.
Sticking to a new, healthy diet can be challenging—we’re all susceptible to a sweet treat from time to time, but longevity coaches will work with you to develop strategies to curb these kinds of cravings. In the long term, they will help you create healthy eating habits that will keep you feeling satisfied—this includes making the right food choices for adequate protein and fiber intake, portion control and meal timing.
Note: Longevity coaches are not dieticians and cannot provide medical nutrition therapy or meal plans.
Health Behaviour Changes: Get Better Sleep
Sleep is an essential factor in overall health and longevity. Not getting enough sleep not only ruins your day, but can also put you at higher risk for certain health conditions if you make a habit out of it.
According to recent research involving 172,321 adults, men who get adequate sleep live about five years longer than men who don’t. For women, it’s two years.
Longevity coaches will help you assess and improve the quality of your sleep to help you recover faster and feel better. They do this by offering personalized strategies for improving your sleep hygiene and environment, as well as providing education on what drives sleep, such as:
Sleep pressure: The drive to sleep builds up in our body as our time awake increases. The pressure gets stronger the longer we stay awake, the more activity we do during the day, and decreases during sleep, reaching a low after a full night of good-quality sleep.
Sleep effort: our cognitive and behavioural conscious attempts to initiate sleep.
Their focus is on improving sleep for enhanced mood, cognitive function and physical resilience. A longevity coach will do this by helping you eliminate barriers to sleep (such as going on your phone right before bed) and structuring a bedtime routine that acts as a cue to your brain that it’s time to get ready to sleep.
Build Stress Resiliency With Your Health Coach
Life’s mishaps are inevitable: your car could break down, you might suddenly get laid off, or get badly injured. And while many of these events are out of our control for the most part, what we can control is how we deal with them.
Prolonged stress, for instance, increases the risk of heart disease, addiction, mood disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Longevity coaches will help assess your current stress management techniques and coping skills, and determine where there is room for improvement. They will provide proven tools and strategies to improve stress management by helping you incorporate strategies such as mindfulness practice, relaxation techniques (like diaphragmatic or box breathing) and time management skills.
These tips will help you manage your day-to-day stress, but also build up your long-term stress resiliency and overall mental health. By not letting setbacks knock you down, you’ll slowly be able to adopt a growth mindset that allows you to constantly reflect and learn from the obstacles in your life.
Accountability Coach & Support in the Longevity Program
Longevity coaches will help you improve your diet, sleep and stress management—but another crucial role they play is holding you accountable on your journey toward better health.
It can be hard to stick to our goals when no one is keeping us in check. But one US study found that you have a 65% chance of completing a goal if you tell someone else you’re committing to doing it. And if you have specific check-ins with a partner, your chance of success rises to 95%!
While your accountability partner could be a friend, family member or colleague, not everyone makes for a good candidate. That’s why having a longevity coach to check in on you can be a better alternative, as they can also adjust your program based on your feedback, and celebrate your wins.
For example, when you book an appointment with a longevity coach at Tall Tree, they will review your goals and your progress to make necessary recommendations at every appointment to make sure you’re feeling on track and confident in your progress.
Healthcare The Way It Should Be Done
Our Longevity Program offers a unique preventative healthcare approach rather than a conventional reactive method. That way, you can take proactive steps to mitigate risks of disease and mental health conditions by implementing consistent healthy habits with the help of our longevity coaches.
Longevity coaches are not a standalone service, and come as a part of our Longevity Program alongside our expert team of healthcare practitioners.
We work with you to design a lifestyle plan tailored to your health metrics and personal goals that you can take ownership of and stick to. Always based on the latest evidence, and designed to optimize your health.
Join the Longevity Program today to become a healthier version of yourself and potentially increase your lifespan!
