Module 6: Decision-Making and Adjustments

Clients should be making results on the calories we put them on. If they're not, the first question is whether they're actually doing what we asked, not whether we asked too much.

The most common coaching failure

The scale doesn't move one week, so the coach drops 100 kcal. It doesn't move the next week, so they drop another 100. By month three the client is on calories they can't live on, the deficit on paper is huge, and progress is somehow still slow. That coach has been cutting food every week instead of doing their actual job.

The actual job, when adherence is the real issue (which it usually is): coach the adherence.

Check in this order

1. Hidden adherence errors. They think they're on plan but aren't: not weighing food, raw versus cooked confusion, untracked drinks and snacks, the kids' leftovers eaten standing up, oil poured not measured. Rule this out before anything else.
2. Social events and weekend calories. Five or six clean days, then one or two big ones. The week averages out to maintenance. "Only one dinner out" can easily be 2,000–3,000 kcal with entrée, main, dessert and drinks.
3. Snacking and hunger drift. Small daily extras, a mid-week binge, calories creeping above plan. More habit-driven than event-driven.
4. Everything else. The stalls that aren't about calories (6.3), plus sleep and stress (6.4).

How to coach it

• Name what you see, specifically. Not "your tracking might need work" but "your weekend weigh-ins jump every Sunday, and I think that's where the deficit is going."
• Ask direct, kind questions. "Talk me through Saturday, start to finish." Curious, not accusatory.
• Re-teach what's slipping. Weighing food raw, handling a meal out, what counts as a "small extra."
• Hold the calories for one clean week. If they hit 90%+ on the existing plan and the scale moves, the deficit was always right. The fix was execution, not food.
• Predict it (the wizard principle). "If we tighten up the weekend this week, I'd expect 400–600 g off by next check-in. If that lands, we don't change anything else."

The rule of thumb

No more than one calorie drop per 4 weeks on the same client without an adherence intervention in between. If you're reaching for a food drop twice inside 4 weeks, stop. Run an adherence week, call the client, re-teach the part that's slipping, then reassess. Most "stuck" cuts unblock the moment adherence is real.

Otherwise you'll lose them in week 8, with a number too low to live on and a relationship too strained to fix.