This Tip continues to explore the Health At Every Size ® paradigm and how it fits with motivational interviewing.

The Health At Every Size (HAES ®) approach to health and weight has been around for several decades. It also has been called the non-diet movement and size acceptance.

Many of us went into the field of nutrition because we want to help people. In our training, we learned about the impact of food intake on medical issues so as to make people’s lives better.

A few weeks ago in the middle of an initial session, I realized that my attention was on the problems with how the client was eating and the way she was thinking about her body and food.

We are in the business of helping people make positive health changes. Reluctance to make these changes will inevitably arise. Let’s pick apart what we often call resistance to understand it better.

In some nutrition counseling settings, clients have not chosen to meet with you. They have been told to or even coerced.

The specific skills we employ in our sessions allow us to effectively guide our clients toward positive health behavior changes. Most of these Tips are devoted to strategies and skills.

If you have chosen to transition your counseling style toward motivational interviewing, you may find that note-taking feels as if it detracts from being present with your client.

Brief Action Planning (BAP), developed by Steven Cole and others, is a communication format based on motivational interviewing and designed for health care settings.

As nutrition counselors, our goal is to help people attain better health through diet changes. We do this by engaging, focusing, evoking and planning.