Coaching
Expert Weight Loss Coaches at your fingertips!
Reach your Leaner Living goals with personal coaches hand-picked by the Lean Docs!!
We have been meticulously waiting and searching for the right personal diet coaching program to come along and help you (our clients and patients) implement the dietary principles we have developed over the years in order to achieve your goals of treating or preventing disease related to obesity and/or sub-optimal dietary habits. We love providing information on diet, exercise, sleep, and other x-factors to help everyone los fat, treat or prevent diabetes and cardiometabolic disease, and feel better about themselves but as physicians we also play a specific role within what should be an optimal health-care team geared toward personalization of everyone’s health goals. That is why we have been eager to find the right nutrition professionals to join our team whom we can confidently refer our patients, clients, and friends in order to help follow-through with our medical guidance.
We have always envisioned providing you with coaches we trust to lead you in the right direction of healthy living, longer living, and leaner living!
We are very excited to introduce you to our newest team members, Georgie Fear, Roland Fisher, and their staff of “One by One Nutrition Habits!”
Here is a brief interview of the cofounders, Georgie and Roland.
Q: Georgie & Roland, please tell me a little about you. What is your story leading to who you are now and how did you get into coaching?
A: Roland – I grew up on a ranch in northern Alberta. I was quite athletic but I was a skinny kid who was bullied a lot. Socially, I fit in more with the “geeks” than the jocks and up until grade 8 I found myself in lockers and without my lunch money on a few occasions. My answer was weight lifting and martial arts. I still remember getting that old York weight set. You know the ones, with plastic plates filled with concrete.
The confidence I felt from getting stronger and more able to handle myself was transformative. I became a man on a mission. I wanted to be Conan the Barbarian combined with Bruce Lee! I wasn’t getting bullied anymore, but I was still rather skinny. I busted my hump and didn’t have much to show for it.
After enough study and hard work I was starting to see progress and I ended up becoming a personal trainer. That was 25 years ago. I’ve trained people ever since and I love it. One problem though, after busting my hump lifting, just to look average, I was also starting to get fat. I was the dreaded skinny fat. Plus my clients would work for sometimes weeks in the gym and their body weight didn’t change much. Clearly I was missing something, exercise just wasn’t enough.
That’s when I became obsessed with nutrition. I was convinced that that was the missing link and I was right, it was. At first I devoured all of the popular books on nutrition that I could find. I read everything from Ornish to Atkins and everything in between. While that was all very interesting, when I applied the knowledge from the books to myself and my clients the results were often short lived or just not effective at all. I needed more.
I turned to studying text books on nutrition and reading research studies, which I still do. That really took my ability to help clients to another level. Finally I was getting some results. I was able to lose the belly and my clients started to succeed. Yet again things didn’t seem to stick. I was seeing too many people lose a large amount of body fat, only to regain it again after they quit working with me. I believe the results should be lasting, so I had to examine what I was doing again and find a way to make the results stick.
I was successful enough with my clients to get the attention of the world’s largest online nutrition coaching company, Precision Nutrition, and they asked me if I wanted to work for them. I accepted and was a Lean Eating Coach for a few years with them. It was with PN that I was turned on to the idea of working with clients to form habits.
Working on habits with hundreds of clients has really shown me that habits are the way to go. Yet there was still something missing. Many people succeeded but many people didn’t succeed. Being a one year program with lessons, Lean Eating moves along at a preset pace doing preset habits, which often aren’t appropriate for the client. I wanted to do better. That’s when my wife and partner Georgie Fear, also an ex PN coach, and I started to talk about what can we do differently? How do we get through to everyone and make sure that their success is permanent?
The result of many long brainstorms over many months is our current coaching system, One by One Nutrition Habits. We combine the best of nutrition science and research with the best of change psychology to help clients form habits that last. Focusing entirely on the individual ensuring that they get exactly what they need, when they need it is the way we ensure that no one gets left behind, no one slips through the cracks. It’s very empowering for the client and for us.
A: Georgie –
Before I coached anyone else to a lean, healthy body, I started with number one. I’ve always been athletic, and my natural love for food and nutritional science served me well in my years as a competitive athlete. I developed my skills as a scientist in graduate school. I honed my skills as a dietitian by practicing clinical nutrition in hospitals. But what me made into a skilled coach were the trials I had with the most difficult client of all: Myself.
I spent my twenties utilizing science and my clinical knowledge to stay lean. I controlled calories, exercised a ton, and kept a keen eye on everything that went in my mouth. But it wasn’t perfect. I avoided social situations at times, spent a lot of mental energy thinking about food, and generally had a poor self-image despite my fit body. I was the type of person who people would stop in the gym and say “Oh my goodness, I want your abs!!” but I never felt good enough. Food guilt or emotional eating were like ghosts always looking over my shoulder. My clients got great results: when they were willing to control calories, exercise madly and stress over food! But as we all know, that doesn’t work for long.
I knew there must be a better way. And I set out to find it.
It took a lot of work to change my thought process, and I spent more than ten years learning how to forge a better relationship with food, trust my body, and get a grip on my need to control everything. Like everyone trying to make a change does, I slipped at times and had to regroup. I changed strategies numerous times, researched and sought out experts and over time collected a bunch of tools that worked for me. Nothing could have been more worth it. Learning the nutrition was the easy part, learning to re-wire my own mind to make leanness effortless was the real win.
But it’s made me a much better coach for having to climb out of my own mental spider web, because now I get to help others every day. At One By One Nutrition Habits we identify the food habits and training changes that will reshape their bodies, and we reshape their thought patterns to make leanness as low-effort as possible. As far as I know, no one else does that.
Q: I love that you focus on both “change psychology” and nutrition science. Tell us about your clients and how they doing.
A: Georgie – It’s been amazing, and so gratifying to see how well people are doing, especially given the diverse types of people we serve. Health gains are impressive: many of our clients have been able to lessen or stop taking medications, lower their blood pressure, and enjoy greatly reduced pain in their joints. They also love being able to buy smaller clothes, be more active with their friends and families, and feel more confident in photos. And even their quality of life improves, because along with developing healthier habits comes a sense of pride, of taking good care of themselves, and walking the talk instead of spinning their wheels.
It’s important to us that we empower the client. This is what Shannon said about that:
“Only Roland and Georgie guide me towards focusing on my body wants instead of what my head wants. Their coaching techniques allow for true investigation into what is right for *me*, not just what’s hot at the time or right for everyone else. There’s just the right combination of careful coaching and giving me my own space to grow. I love being able to pick up the phone and call or send a quick email with my progress and have someone answer right away – someone that already knows my history and what I’m going through.” — Shannon S.
Q: Tell me about how your coaching program works?
A: Roland – We’ve got the experience and we have done the research and the verdict is in, “diets” don’t work for very long. So we do something different. We combine nutrition science with “change psychology” to help people make specific habit changes that lead to a healthier diet and a healthier weight. The habit approach is hugely successful too. People are continually surprised at how easy it turns out to be.
We accomplish that by first talking with our clients and discussing their situation so that together we find their number one success obstacle. We then form an action plan together to address it, picking a habit to form. Two weeks later we do another call to reevaluate and find the next best habit to form if the client is ready to tackle more. In between calls we use unlimited email to help as we go. One step at a time, one habit at a time, we get it done.
