How an Integrative Cancer Coach can help you achieve meaningful transformations

I am now a qualified Integrative Cancer Coach.

It has been an honour to study and receive the qualification of the Integrative Health Coach for cancer populations with the Cancer Wellness Institute. Having spent the last three years in clinical Health Coaching, I felt the calling to further extend my coaching skills to start helping people with cancer. Cancer is a chronic inflammatory condition, thus with the experience I have gained working with a large variety of chronic inflammatory health conditions I truly hope to be able to improve the health outcomes of cancer patients and survivors.

The role of a Health Coach, not to forget, is different to that of a nutritionist or a therapist (both have an important role in the lives of cancer patients). A Cancer Health Coach helps clients identify their health and life goals and through activation of self-management techniques enables clients to bring transformational changes into their lives.

Research has noted that most healthcare support offered to cancer patients is primarily centred around the medical aspects of cancer therapy. Whereas those interventions that help cancer patients grow capacity to self-manage their condition improve the outcomes of cancer illness. Health Coaching has been shown to do that - grow capacity.

Several studies have reported that Cancer Coaching can help cancer patients and survivors create significant improvements in overall quality of life. Research found that when being supported by Cancer Coaches, patients were found to have reductions in perceived levels of stress, anxiety and depression; had improvements in the quality of their sleep, including changes in sleep duration and sleep efficiency. Most importantly, patients reported improved quality of life, especially in areas of physical and emotional wellbeing.

Health Coaching improves survivorship.

As a result of Health Coaching, cancer patients have:

• Fewer medical visits - being able to better identify symptoms that require medical attention and distinguish them from side-effects of therapy
• Better management of chronic pain and chronic fatigue
• Increased understanding and communicating their health-related needs
• Improved management of their weight and nutrition
• Better coping with anxiety and depression related to their illness and treatment

A Cancer Coach is the person whose purpose is to guide the client towards healthier behaviours, with the client themselves identifying those areas of utmost need. A major emphasis here is on increasing physical activity and improving dietary habits. A Cancer Health Coach assists patients in identifying and pursuing the very behaviours that they themselves perceive as important for their wellbeing or that are defined as healthy, at that moment in time.

Additionally, a Cancer Coach helps the client to understand their diagnosis better, their treatment plan and care. With the clinical knowledge, they help the client understand the important biomarkers and how to read their medical reports, they help clear confusion and reduce overwhelm from medical jargon. An important aspect of Health Coaching for cancer is that the coach enables and inspires the client to become an active participant in their health management. The client feels empowered to seek information and create their personalised health plan.

Integrative Health Coaching for cancer addresses and works with the four pillars of health. These have been my foundations for Health Coaching before, and I was humble to learn they are still the supportive pillars of health for cancer coaching too. These are nutrition, sleep, exercise and stress management.

Why are these specifically important?

Nutrition

All chronic disease is affected by poor diet choices. Although there are many protocols for dietary changes in cancer patients, a Cancer Coach is not there to endorse a specific protocol. We are here to guide the client to adopt healthy changes in their diet with the main focus on the abundance of anti-inflammatory foods.

Good nutrition allows patients to maintain a healthy weight balance, reduce sugar cravings, reduce systemic inflammation and increase anti-inflammatory response.

Weight management is a common concern for cancer patients and survivors. Some people put on weight, others lose a lot of weight; it is rather common for the weight to fluctuate greatly through the treatment.

Weight gain is strongly associated with cancer recurrence. One meta analysis showed that women who gained 10% or more of their body weight after breast cancer diagnosis had a 23–40% higher risk of death compared with women who maintained a stable weight.

Sleep

Improved quality of sleep helps cancer patients increase their daily energy, reduce anxiety, improve mood, stay more active and reduce chronic pain. Poor sleep and chronic pain have a bidirectional relationship, where obtaining adequate sleep should be the main goal to reduce chronic pain that affects a large majority of cancer patients. Thus helping clients adopt a better sleeping routine, educating about

circadian rhythms and planning together to create a healthy bedtime go a long way in improving quality of life every day.

Exercise

Research shows that exercising at least three times per week reduces the following cancer occurrence: bladder, breast, colon, endometrial, oesophageal, kidney, stomach and other.

Exercise reduces inflammation markers, helps balance blood sugar levels, improves immune system functioning and prevents weight gain - all important health factors for cancer progress and success of recovery.

Breast cancer survivors who are physically active have a 42% lower risk of death from any cause and a 40% lower risk of death from breast cancer than those who are the least physically active.

Stress management and emotional support

Chronic stress causes inflammatory response in the body, increasing inflammation on the cellular level. The regular activation of stress response via the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) promotes tumorigenesis. A Cancer Coach helps clients learn stress coping tools, including mindfulness, meditation, gratitude practice, deep breathing techniques and other. By being an active listener, the coach is able to to tune into the client’s emotional state at the very point of the health journey.

The emotional mindset of the client plays an important part in cancer coaching sessions. A coach is the person who enables clients to see their patterns of thinking, recognise the beliefs that no longer serve them, helps them become ‘unstuck’ and guides them to see themselves as capable and strong participants of their own health journey.

Coaching in cancer is a patient-centred, individualised relational form of support. The transformations a Cancer Coach can help clients achieve are felt via a variety of new experiences (such as better physical health, regained strength, etc), new perspectives, improved resilience and growth.

A coach is the person who helps people become truly authentic with themselves through growth capacity. And in the words of Dorothy Corkille Briggs, “Growth is not steady, forward, upward progression. It is instead a switchback trail: three steps forward, two back, one around the bushes, and a few simple standing, before another forward leap.”

Reach out if you or your loved one needs my support.

Stay healthy, be joyful!

Love,

Katya

References:

Does Health Coaching Grow Capacity in Cancer Survivors? A Systematic Review, Suzette Barakat, Kasey Boehmer, Marwan Abdelrahim, Sangwoo Ahn, Abdulrahman A Al-Khateeb, Neri Álvarez Villalobos, Larry Prokop, Patricia J Erwin, Kirsten Fleming, Valentina Serrano, Gabriela Spencer-Bonilla, Mohammad Hassan Murad, Populations Health Magazine, Feb 2018: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28636526/

2. Preliminary Effectiveness Study of a Community-Based Wellness Coaching for Cancer Survivors Program, Nicole J Berzins, Michael Mackenzie , Mary Lou Galantino, Nicole Pickles, Sean Hebbel, Tara Leonard, Diane Beneck, Michael Peterson, American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, Mar, 2023: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39262887/

3. National Cancer Institute: https://www.cancer.gov/

4. “Weight Gain After Breast Cancer Diagnosis and All-Cause Mortality: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, Mary C. Playdon , Michael B. Bracken , Tara B. Sanft , Jennifer A. Ligibel , Maura Harrigan , Melinda L. Irwin; Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Dec 2015, https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article-abstract/107/12/djv275/2457727?redirectedFrom=fulltext#google_vignette