r/HealthCoaching

Hi everyone 👋

I’m currently working toward my ICF ACC credential and am looking for people who would be interested in peer coaching / practice coaching exchanges to help build coaching hours.

I’ve completed the coursework portion and am now focused on accumulating the required coaching experience hours. I’m especially interested in connecting with people who are:

• Also pursuing an ICF certification (ACC/PCC/etc.)
• Interested in practicing coaching skills in a structured way
• Open to barter-style coaching exchanges
• Wanting accountability, career coaching, life coaching, confidence building, communication skills, work stress support, etc.

A bit about me:

• Background in psychology + clinical research/project management
• Interested in coaching around life direction, emotional patterns, productivity, relationships, self-confidence, career decisions, and personal development in general.
• I take the coaching process seriously and want sessions to feel genuinely helpful, not just “checking a box” for hours

What I’m hoping for:

• Regular virtual sessions (Zoom/Google Meet)
• Mutual feedback after sessions
• Potential long-term peer coaching partnership
• Optional testimonial exchange if helpful for credentialing/business building later

If you’re interested, comment below or DM me with:

• Your coaching background (if any)
• What kind of coaching you’re looking for
• Your timezone/availability

Even if you’re not pursuing ICF and just want free/practice coaching, feel free to reach out 😊

Hi everyone! I’m working to get my certificate as a health coach. And I’m looking for someone who is interested in being a volunteer coachee for 20 minutes session, anyone who has a health, wellness, or lifestyle goal that would like to achieve. The coaching session will be recorded so that my supervisor can assess my coaching skills. Please let me know, thanks! 

I’m a health coach but some of my work crosses into medical nutrition therapy. My malpractice carrier now requires professional license verification if I’m supervising RDs or RNs in my program.

I need to confirm their licenses monthly. Doing it manually for 6 clinicians is eating my Sundays. Any tools for small practices?

Hi! I’m a new health and wellness coach and holistic nutritionist and would love any feedback you guys could give on getting my first paying clients. I don’t mind playing the long game and taking my time I just need help figuring out what to do.

There’s so much information out there on marketing, running ads, sales funnels, content creation, hosting events etc and it can get pretty overwhelming trying to figure out what to focus on. I’d like to get feedback from experienced coaches on what worked best for you starting out.

I would be grateful for any advice or suggestions. Thanks in advance!

Hello! I’m wrapping up my certificate in Health and Wellness Coaching and need to record one final coaching session for review by my instructor. I’m looking for someone to be my client for that 30 minute session. I’m in Central Standard Time and need to do it over Zoom by May 24. I’d be happy to be your client in exchange! Let me know if you’re interested.

Hi everyone, I’m hoping for some honest guidance from people already in this space.

I recently started looking into certification programs focused on women’s hormone health, integrative medicine, and holistic wellness. One of the first programs I came across was the Integrative Women’s Health Institute, and at first it sounded exactly like what I was looking for. Everything listed under the perimenopause and menopause certification sounded SO amazing. But after reading some Reddit reviews, I saw feedback saying it was a waste of money.

A little background on me: I don’t come from a medical background, but I did study Communication Sciences and Disorders and worked in a clinical setting for some time. Recently, I co-authored a book focused on women’s hormones and cycle health, originally just from personal passion and research, but the response from women around us has been incredibly meaningful. It made me realize this is something I genuinely want to pursue more deeply and potentially build a career around helping women better understand and support their hormone health.

I’m especially drawn to a holistic/integrative approach, but I also want something legitimate with real education, structure, and credibility. I don’t necessarily want to go to medical school, but I would love some kind of respected certification, accreditation, or training path that would allow me to support women ethically and knowledgeably.

For those already in this field:

• What programs would you actually recommend?
• Which certifications are respected vs. mostly marketing?
• Are there paths you wish you had taken instead?
• Would you recommend nutrition, functional medicine, hormone coaching, naturopathy, etc.?

This is a completely new direction opening up for me, so I’d really appreciate honest advice or personal experiences. Thank you!

Edit: I am based in Los Angeles and would prefer an online program, if possible.

Hoping some of the more experienced coaches on this thread can jump in with a bit of practical advice for a particular client type...

Over the past year, I've had a couple of clients (one who I "released" after six sessions, the other current who I'm trying to decide what to do with) who feel/seem very "stuck" when we begin and motivated to change.

Something weird happens after our first couple of sessions: they're all better! They report back that all they needed was someone to be accountable to and that they now see their behaviors and patterns clearly and everything is moving in the right direction. They're fixed! I'm amazing!

Thing is, in both cases, this doesn't seem to align with any actual behavior change. In both cases they seem, really, to just want someone to vent to for an hour.

Part of me thinks: well, that's a valid function, right? They're paying me, so...this is fine, right?

The other part knows that these clients are approaching "uncoachable" and if someone asked them what I do, they probably wouldn't actually be able to give a clear answer.

Other than "tough love" ("I've noticed that your goals seem very different than they were when we began") and firing the client...any thoughts about motivating these folks to actually do a little inward searching? Any other advice?

Hi, I just recently got my NBCHWC certification and I’ve been trying to find a job, any advice on where to get your first health coaching remote job?

I work with nutrition clients on the side, around fifteen to twenty at any given time, mixed weight management, sports nutrition and general lifestyle work and I rebuilt my entire client management setup over the last year because what I had was genuinely not working and I figured I'd write down what's actually working in 2026 in case it's useful. No referral links, no codes, some opinions you may not like.

Treat this as one practitioner's setup, not gospel. What works for fifteen clients on the side is not what works for a full time practice with fifty.

Client management

Practice Better is the default recommendation in nutrition and health coaching circles and it deserves it for full time practitioners, meal plan builder, client portal, progress tracking, group programmes, the whole thing in one place and pricing runs around $25 to $59 a month depending on client volume which is reasonable if you're doing this full time and using the whole platform.

The catch is that if you're running a smaller operation the full platform is more than you need and you end up paying for features you never open which is fine until you realise the features you actually use daily are the ones that exist in cheaper tools.

Healthie is the other name that comes up constantly and it's a strong product, better for practices that need insurance billing and HIPAA compliance baked in at the infrastructure level, pricing starts around $29 a month and climbs with client volume, worth it if you're billing insurance, probably more than you need if you're not.

For smaller operations I'd look at simply using Notion as a client database before committing to a dedicated platform because the overhead of setting it up is two hours and the ongoing maintenance is five minutes a day and for fifteen clients it does everything you actually need which is knowing where each person is, what you discussed last time and when you need to reach out next.

Scheduling

Calendly is the default and it works and has the brand recognition that makes clients comfortable booking without feeling like they're navigating something unfamiliar, free tier covers most use cases for smaller practices and the paid tier at $10 a month adds routing and customisation that matters once you're managing multiple session types.

Acuity is what I'd recommend over Calendly for anyone doing intake forms seriously because the form builder is significantly better and if you're collecting health history and goal information before a first session the quality of that intake process matters more than most people realise, pricing is around $16 a month and worth it if intake is part of your workflow.

If your client management platform has scheduling built in, use that first and don't add another tool.

Client communication and email

This is where I have the strongest opinions and where I see the most practitioners running into problems because email in health coaching is not just communication, it is your check-in system, your accountability layer, your referral source and your retention mechanism all in one place and treating it like a normal inbox is how you quietly lose clients to silence rather than to anything you did wrong.

Stock Gmail with no layer on top is fine if you have under ten clients and a light communication volume, if you're answering twenty emails a day across fifteen active clients you need something more.

Serif is what I use and it's the one I'd recommend for anyone managing clients primarily over email and it works inside Gmail, learns from your past sent emails and drafts replies in your voice, triages incoming messages and tracks follow-ups so threads don't go cold while you're heads down on something else, the follow-up tracking specifically is what changed my retention because it surfaces threads where a client has reached out and I haven't responded which at this volume happens more than I'd like to admit, voice training takes about a week from past sent emails before drafts stop sounding generic and around 75 to 80 percent go out with minimal edits after I review them, I review everything before it sends, nothing goes to a client unsupervised.

Loom for anything where a written response isn't enough because some clients respond significantly better to a short personalised video than a carefully written email and being able to record two minutes of genuinely personal feedback in less time than writing it out has changed how several of my client relationships feel, free tier covers most use cases at this volume.

Content and education

If you're creating any kind of educational content for clients whether that's guides, meal frameworks or habit trackers, Canva handles almost everything you need at the free tier and the templates are good enough that you don't need a designer for standard client-facing documents.

Notion again for building your own resource library, frameworks you reuse across clients, meal plan templates, habit tracking structures, the things you find yourself explaining repeatedly are worth building once properly and storing somewhere you can pull from rather than recreating from scratch every time.

Tracking and accountability

Cronometer for food tracking recommendations to clients because the nutrient database is more complete than MyFitnessPal and the data is cleaner which matters when you're actually trying to identify specific deficiencies rather than just logging calories, free tier is sufficient for most client use cases.

MyFitnessPal is what most clients already have which is sometimes more important than what's technically better because a tool a client actually uses is worth more than a better tool they don't open and if they're already on it I don't fight that battle unless there's a specific reason to.

Whoop or Oura for clients who want objective data on recovery and sleep because the conversation about nutrition changes significantly when you can connect it to actual recovery metrics rather than subjective energy levels, I don't mandate either but I recommend them to clients where the data would genuinely change what we do together.

The thing nobody tells you about all of this

The biggest thing I learned rebuilding my setup is that the tools are not the value, the consistency they force you into is the value.

To get Notion to actually work as a client tracker I had to decide what I was tracking and why which forced me to think clearly about what a successful client relationship actually looks like at each stage, what does week two look like versus week eight and what should I know about each client at each point. To get Serif to draft in my voice I had to understand what my voice is with different types of clients, someone who is struggling needs a different kind of message than someone who is having a great week and I had been making those distinctions implicitly without ever writing them down. To get any of these tools to work I had to codify decisions I had been making by instinct since I started.

That documentation is now more useful to me than any individual tool because it is how I onboard new clients consistently, it is what keeps my check-ins feeling personal even when I am busy and it is the thing that would let me hand this practice to someone else if I ever needed to.

The tools are replaceable. The clarity underneath them is not.

What's not on this list and why

I left off most dedicated meal planning software because the right answer depends entirely on your practice area and client demographic and there are too many variables for a general recommendation to be useful.

I left off telehealth platforms because if you need one you already know which one your clients can access and the compliance requirements in your jurisdiction matter more than any feature comparison I could offer.

I left off anything I haven't used long enough to have a real opinion on and there are several tools people recommend constantly that I tried briefly and cannot speak to honestly.

If I missed something you'd recommend, tell me what it does better than what I named and in what specific situation, generic suggestions without that context aren't useful to anyone reading this.

Hi,

I just completed my course work for NBHWC certification. I am currently working to obtain my required 50 coaching session before submitting my application to sit for the NBHWC board exam.

I am currently offering free coaching swaps, single sessions, or a complete 12 week program for anyone interested.

Please, comment or send a DM if you are interested, and I will send you my scheduling link.

Hello! I am a 28 year old woman living in San Diego, CA. I have a BA in psychology and minor in holistic health. Since graduating I've worked at 2 different non-profits. I honestly haven't been fulfilled in what I am doing since non-profits are usually short staffed and over worked. I have always been into nutrition and wellness, hence why I got a minor in holistic health. There are sooo many health coach certifications out there and I would like to know which are best for learning the actual coaching process plus networking and coaching hours? I need something with a set schedule also, I've done random online courses that are "do at your own time" and that does not work for me, I have no motivation to complete them.

Any advice is welcome! I really need a change in direction in life because I've been unhappy for too long.