When you live with chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes, obesity, or both, you’ve probably been handed plenty of advice. Especially with lifestyle-related chronic conditions. Eat less. Move more. Check your levels. Lose the weight. The advice is rarely wrong, but it is often incomplete, because knowing what to do has never been the hard part. The hard part is doing it, day after day, in a real life with work, family, stress, budgets, and bad weeks.
That gap between knowing and doing is where health coaching earns its place.
Every person’s story is unique.
When I left school I had my heart set on a journalism cadetship at the Auckland Star. Shockingly, despite coming top in English at school, I wasn’t accepted. In hindsight, I wasn’t cut out for the ambulance-chasing style of journalism of its time, because what I was interested in was people’s stories. The Why – why did you do that? How did that happen? How did that make you feel? Questions that reveal, uncover, and expose the story.
And as happy-ever-after stories go, this followed the same format – after I dusted myself off, I ended up in a career that suited me so better: working in radio, in the newsroom (being serious and writing serious news) and then on-air having fun as a host.
Skip forward a few decades, and I’m out of the studio and in the clinics, working as a Health and Nutrition Coach for a private specialist lifestyle medicine clinic, and a rural GP practice. And those skills learnt in the media industry, are now the foundation of my style of health coaching.
Every person’s story is unique.
When I sit down in the clinic with a person with pre-diabetes, they bring far more than a diagnosis. They bring a history: the diets they’ve tried, the family meals they grew up with, the doctor who made them feel judged, the year everything fell apart, and the small win last month that they’re quietly proud of. Two people with identical HbA1c results or the same BMI can arrive with entirely different stories, and those stories shape what will and won’t work for them.
The stories shape the behaviours. Someone who grew up in a household where food meant love and generosity will experience “cutting back” very differently from someone who grew up with scarcity and learned to never waste a plate.
Context is part of the story. Health isn’t managed in a vacuum. Work hours, income, housing, cultural food traditions, caring responsibilities, access to safe places to move, mental health, and the support (or lack of it) at home all determine what’s realistic. A suggestion to “prep meals on Sunday” means little to someone working two jobs, and “join a gym” lands differently for someone in a rural area, someone with limited mobility, or someone who has been made to feel unwelcome in fitness spaces.
Unique stories mean unique definitions of success. For one person, success is coming off a medication with their doctor’s support. For another, it’s walking to the letterbox without stopping, cooking a meal from scratch for the first time in years, or going a whole week without berating themselves after a slip. When we understand this, progress becomes personal rather than measured only against a standard the person never chose.
Unique stores protect against blame. Recognising that every story is different helps dismantle the idea that chronic conditions are simply a failure of willpower. Biology, environment, history, and circumstance all play a part, and people deserve support that reflects that complexity rather than a one-size-fits-all lecture.
Plans, targets, and clinical guidance still matter, but they only take root when they fit the life of the person carrying them out.
Living with a chronic condition is a long game, and no two people play it the same way. Health coaching works because it meets people where they are, and builds on their strengths, from their own unique life’s story.
Jaala Dyer is co-founder and Lead Health Coach at Reversal NZ, a private lifestyle medicine clinic specialising in the reversal and prevention of metabolic illnesses and chronic conditions.
She is also Health & Nutrition coach in a rural General practice which is leading a unique multi-year project to measure and improve health outcomes of the local community.
