When a client goes quiet, write on day 7, 14 and 28

Attendance is what separates a result from no result

A client who is not responding to their nutrition coach has usually not fired you. They missed a check-in, felt behind, and found that saying nothing was easier than explaining. A review of 61 dropout studies is clear that the people who keep turning up are the people who get a result, and equally clear that nobody can tell you in advance which client will stop.

So do not try to predict it. Run the same short contact schedule every time, and know the day you stop.

Nobody has found a way to predict which client stops replying

Irena Moroshko, Leah Brennan and Paul O'Brien reviewed 61 studies published before May 2011 on why people leave weight loss programmes, in Obesity Reviews. Their opening sentence is the one to pin above the desk.

Attendance and completion of weight loss intervention is associated with better weight loss outcomes; however, attrition is neither consistently reported nor comprehensively explored in the weight loss literature.

Across those 61 studies they could not name a set of predictors that held up. What came up more often than a client's background characteristics were psychological and behavioural factors, and processes in the treatment itself.

That second half is the useful part. If dropping out tracked background characteristics, you could screen for it on the intake form and price accordingly. It tracks what happens during the coaching, which means it is yours to act on and it happens on a date you can see in your inbox.

The trials that worked scheduled the contact instead of waiting for it

The Diabetes Prevention Program ran a lifestyle arm with 1,079 participants and cut the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 58 percent. Its published description of the intervention lists frequent contact with participants as the second of eight key features, ahead of the curriculum itself. After the 16-session core curriculum, contact did not become optional.

After completing the 16-session core curriculum, the protocol required that participants be seen face-to-face at least once every 2 months for the remainder of the trial and be contacted by phone at least once between visits.

Three other details from that paper are worth copying. Coaches had a budget of about $100 per participant per year for a "toolbox" of small things to unstick someone, from a cookbook to a place in a community exercise class. Every clinical centre had to offer three group courses a year during the maintenance phase, and restart programmes, for people who wanted to begin serious weight loss again, were among the popular ones. And in the first year, each lifestyle coach was called monthly by a member of the study's Lifestyle Resource Core to review their nonadherent participants.

None of that is exotic. It is a schedule, a small budget, a way back in, and somebody asking the coach about the people who went missing.

Write on day 7, day 14 and day 28, and then stop

Here is what we think, and it is a choice rather than a finding. Three messages, on a fixed schedule, and a stated end.

Day 7 is early enough that the client has not yet built a story about why they are avoiding you. Day 14 is the point where a missed week turns into a missed block, and where naming the obstacle still costs them one sentence. Day 28 is where you stop, because a fourth and fifth message stop being care and start being pressure, and pressure is the thing that makes coming back feel expensive.

The schedule matters more than the wording. If you leave it to how you feel that day, you will chase the clients you like and quietly write off the ones you find hard, and the ones you find hard are usually the ones the silence is telling you something about. How often you were in touch before the silence changes how loud it is. That is the decision behind check-in cadence.

Three messages, each answerable with one word

These are ours. Take the shape and put your own voice through it.

Day 7. "Hi Sam. Nothing needed from you today. I have moved this week's check-in to Monday so you get a clean week. If Monday is wrong, say a word and I will move it again."

Day 14. "Hi Sam. Two weeks off is normally a work thing or a life thing, not a food thing. Tell me which one and I will change the plan to fit it, rather than the other way round."

Day 28. "Hi Sam. I am going to stop messaging so I am not one more thing in your inbox. Your plan and your numbers stay where they are. Send me one line whenever you want them back and we pick up from the week you stopped, not from the start."

Each one is under 50 words, needs no attachment, and can be answered with a single word. That is the whole design.

Leave the weight, the plan and the guilt out of the first message

Four things make a quiet client quieter, and coaches send all four with good intentions.

No weight, no photo. You have asked for the one number they are avoiding, and now replying means confessing.

No revised plan attached, either. A new plan says the old one failed, and it hands someone who is already behind a fresh task with a deadline on it.

Do not mention the last message. "Just checking in again" tells the client you have been counting, and it turns their silence into a debt.

And no open questions. "How have things been going?" needs a paragraph, and a paragraph is exactly what they cannot face writing. Ask something they can answer with "Monday" or "work".

One client coming back is worth more than four messages cost

Wing and Phelan, writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, put the share of people with overweight who achieve long-term weight loss at about 20 percent, where long-term means losing at least 10 percent of initial body weight and holding it for a year. Members of the National Weight Control Registry they drew on had lost an average of 33 kg and kept it off for more than five years. Their finding on time is the one that should change your arithmetic: once someone has held a loss for two to five years, the chance of longer-term success rises sharply.

So a client who comes back in week four is not a client restarting at zero. They are a client whose clock keeps running.

What stops a coach from bothering is rarely the message. It is the thought of rebuilding a plan for someone who may vanish again, which is an evening. That is the job Peas & Pans does, meal plans in minutes rather than evenings, so a client who comes back after a month costs you a message and not a night.

After day 28, move them to dormant and tell them so

Silence needs a filing category, or it sits in your head as a half-open job and you carry twenty of them. Ours is dormant: the plan stays, the targets stay, the client is off the check-in rota, and they have been told so in the day 28 message.

Tell them the terms of coming back in that same message, in one line, because the terms are the whole reason someone does come back. No re-onboarding. No repeat intake form. They write one sentence and you pick up from the week they stopped. The Diabetes Prevention Program called these restart programmes and taught them as one of its group classes. It is the cheapest thing on this page and the only one that turns a lost client into a paused one.