Conversation Is Medicine

"I keep hoping
For a cure
For some medicine
Just one conversation"
— Matthew Ryan

My feed these days is filled with wellness content touting all kinds of things as "medicine." Food is medicine. Movement is medicine. Sleep is medicine.

As a personal trainer for over twenty years and a health and wellness coach, I happen to agree with all of those, but I’d also add "conversation" to the list.

A few months ago, I tried something different with a long-term training client who wanted to lose weight. Instead of training two days per week, we spent one of those days in a coaching session.

She's lost 10 pounds since then. Not from more time or effort in the gym, but from understanding her own habits, and with some guidance, changing them for the better.

None of the changes we arrived at are exactly revelatory: walking at the mall to beat the summer heat, modifying commitments that kept her sedentary for hours, finding new ways to increase her protein, and tracking her water intake.

AI could tell you to do all those things. So could virtually any fitness podcast.

Having the information is no longer the hard part. The challenge is making healthy habits fit your unique life in a way that's sustainable and effective. That's what health and wellness coaching is for, and it's a collaborative process.

As a young trainer, I would have been skeptical that two people talking in a room could be a more effective weight loss tool for some clients than an hour spent burning calories. "Move more, eat less" was the ethos.

While that still holds true, I've seen time and again that when clients successfully internalize healthy behaviors, that shift can be far more meaningful than reaching any specific goal or outcome.

You don't do the healthy thing because you should. You do it because you want to. Over time, it becomes less of a conscious effort and more a part of who you are.

Helping clients navigate that evolution is the work I've come to value and enjoy most and the reason I founded Mission Bell Health & Wellness.

If there’s a change you’d like to make in your own life that might begin with a conversation, let’s talk.