Hire a coach
Kilter isn’t medical advice or even personalised recommendations
You can do this alone if you’re willing to work your way around the uncertainties and sometimes conflicting advice. Or you can hire a coach. A good coach makes all the difference between something that is just a curiosity and something you can actually achieve.
If you have certain medical conditions, working solo on the back of incomplete knowledge can be dangerous. Consult someone.
Because coaching is intense and time consuming, a good coach will likely be expensive and overbooked. We are therefore not going to recommend a coach for you—it doesn’t help you if they become unavailable as a result of the recommendation. We will instead honour the ones we respect by sharing their wisdom. If there is opportunity for direct interaction, such as a guest post or a meetup, we’ll facilitate it.
You should be cautious of soundbite wisdom as the nuances do matter. Oversimplification is why so much advice is conflicting or plain wrong, and why a dialogue with a coach matters. We’ll do our best to be comprehensive on this blog, but the world of knowledge is much deeper than we can cover.
The quality of a coach can vary considerably—just like a candidate for any other job. You shouldn’t engage the first coach you encounter, and you certainly shouldn’t trust any coach thrust on you as part of a deal. If you’ve ever signed up for a gym membership and been assigned a coach who worked you to serious fatigue on the first day, you know what we mean. A good coach will keep you motivated, not scare you away. A gym benefits from having unused capacity to sell to the next subscriber. You don’t.
Interview your coach before you hire them. Look for trusted references. Ask them questions on their overall framework and why they believe in it. A good coach should be able to point you to reliable research or scientific papers to back their claims. Read up so you can filter out the charlatans before you waste more time on them. But hire a coach if you’re serious about improving your body.
Good coaches tend to be specialists, so if you’re pursuing multiple goals such as say losing weight and running a marathon, you’ll be working with more than one. Sometimes they’ll disagree on the fundamentals, and that is when conversations get interesting. The hallmark of a good coach is that they don’t just guide you, they also learn from you.
If you’re concerned about the expense, be aware that much of what we’ll discuss involves non-trivial expenses, whether it’s the digital scale we recommended yesterday, or several other sorts of metrics coming up in future posts. Good health isn’t cheap—it’s just that prevention is cheaper than a cure.
With that caveat aside, we hope you will find this blog, the community around it, and the upcoming conference informative sources for positive life change. (If you don’t have that scale yet, get one now. This only works if you participate.)
Tomorrow we’ll discuss the medical reports you need before you get started, whether you’re working with a coach or doing it alone.
Kilter is HasGeek’s humble attempt to provide a space for reasoned debate on how your body actually works, and how you can find your own path to good health via better nutrition, fitness and habits.
Tickets for Kilter are available. Buy them here:
If you want to propose a talk at Kilter 2017, submit your talk here.
