#614: The Human Skills of Nutrition Coaching – Krista Scott-Dixon, PhD

**Danny Lennon** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. My name is Danny Lennon. This is episode 614 of the podcast.
And today, we're gonna be taking a look at a topic that will be of interest to many of you, but in particular, those of you who are practitioners in nutrition or health fields, and are aiming to help people. So anytime you're dealing with a human being in a setting where you are going to have patients or clients or helping them improve their nutrition, their health, et cetera, there is many aspects that need to be looked at. And of course, if you've been doing this for a while, you will be very acutely aware of how much that relationship that you form with the person dictates the likely success of that coaching interaction. And so this key challenge then becomes of how do we not only build those appropriate relationships and use the appropriate skills that allow for that connection with another human being. And so to take a look at navigating some of these issues and looking at some of the human skills that underpin effective coaching practice, today I'm going to be talking with Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon, who has been a long time coach, academic, has been at the forefront of developing curricula for nutrition coaching, and she has taken a deep look at a number of these topics that relate to being a nutrition practitioner and really helping people. Not only has she experienced as a nutritionist, as well as looking at some of the research here, but as also training as a counselor and has used some of these ideas from counseling and psychology to augment nutrition and health coaching within the defined scope of practice. And beyond that, she's actually written a textbook on all of this. And so we're going to tap into some of these ideas and hopefully it proves interesting to not only of you who are nutrition professionals, but anyone else that just finds the concepts around habit change, and particularly as that relates to health changes, an interesting topic. For those of you who are Sigma Nutrition premium subscribers, after the discussion, you will hear the key ideas segment where I'll recap some of those ideas. And you also have your detailed study notes available to you, so you can find them by clicking through in the description box where you're currently listening, or just go over to sigmanutrition.com, and when you navigate to this episode, you will find all the premium material there. For those of you listening on the public feed of the podcast and are interested in getting more out of your podcast listening and really using it as a educational resource, then consider Sigma Nutrition premium. It's our membership for those of you who not only want to support the podcast and keep this thing going as it's the direct way that the podcast is allowed to run, as we rely on you, our listeners, as our direct source of funding. But you in return get study notes for each of the podcast episodes that come out that go through all the concepts that were discussed, include any diagrams or graphs that may be useful to explain concepts, links to studies, descriptions of the key things that were discussed, terminology that was used in the episode broken down, etc. You also get a fully edited transcript of the podcast, and then you get our key idea segments afterwards. And then each month there is a premium exclusive episode of the podcast, which is only available to premium subscribers. So if you do want to support the podcast and you want to get more out of this listing and retain more of what you're listening to, then consider Sigma Nutrition Premium. I'll link that in the description box where you're currently listening right now.
So without further ado, let's dive into this conversation between myself and Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon.
A very big welcome back to the podcast to Krista Scott-Dixon. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me again.

**Krista Scott-Dixon** (4:13)
Well, thanks for having me back. It's nice to see you again and to chat with you and to get an updated take on what's been going on in the last while.

**Danny Lennon** (4:20)
Yeah, there's quite a lot to get to. And for people listening who maybe didn't catch your previous appearances on the podcast, can you give an introduction to your background, anything that might be relevant?

**Krista Scott-Dixon** (4:32)
So, former academic, currently what I would call a coach and an educator.
I focus mostly on health behaviors, lifestyle, but also mental skills for performance. And so that's evolved over the years. So in the beginning, I started it with general population folks, just regular people, trying to eat healthier and get in shape and that kind of stuff. And it's evolved now to, it's evolved through nutrition, especially with my time at Precision Nutrition. And it's evolved much more now to things like professional education for coaches, teaching coaches to be better coaches. One of the groups I specialize in now is high performance people. So a lot of mental skills for high performance stuff like military, special operations, first responders, that sort of thing. And then I'm also kind of moving now into consulting. So working with groups like executive leadership or academic institutions like teaching their students mental skills and that kind of stuff. So there's a huge domain of stuff that I do, but it all falls into the bucket of some kind of coaching and education around feeling better, functioning better, performing better, depending on what somebody's better is. And I'm sure the focus today will be more on nutrition, which is sort of in my bread and butter, so to speak. But that's really kind of the general overview. And then on the side as well, my day job, so to speak, is working with an app that does AI nutrition coaching, health coaching, fitness coaching, and developing models for how to bring that human connection into something like an app for people that maybe wouldn't want to get human coaching or just can't afford it. So it just makes AI coaching much more accessible to people.