In this Coach Corner episode, I answer a single powerful question. A practitioner asked how to respond when a client is told to lose weight “to get healthier.” This topic is complex, emotional, and vital for anyone practicing a non-diet approach.
I walk through how I handle this situation in my own work. I explore the roots of the belief that weight equals health. I show how to guide clients toward a deeper view of health. I also explain why a weight-neutral approach creates more space, more trust, and more sustainable change.
Episode Highlights & Timeline
[1:12] – Why this question matters in a non-diet practice.
[2:30] – How our training taught us to link weight and health.
[4:00] – Why BMI was never designed to measure health.
[6:07] – The problem with the words “overweight” and “obese.”
[8:01] – The family-lineup exercise that shifts beliefs fast.
[10:36] – Defining health without linking it to body size.
[12:55] – Why weight loss is not a health behavior.
[14:42] – How movement supports health without dieting.
[15:38] – Gentle nutrition without rules or restriction.
[17:24] – The role of mental and emotional health in wellbeing.
[19:06] – Why sleep struggles are rarely about knowledge.
[20:16] – How weight-neutral care transforms client outcomes.
Mentioned in the show:
Ep 312-How to Be Healthier Without Losing Weight
Non-Diet Coaching Certification Waitlist
What To Say When Clients Want To Lose Weight Guide
Weight-Neutral Coaching Training
Full Episode Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated and lightly edited for clarity.
Click to expand the full transcript
How can clients pursue health without focusing on weight?
Clients can pursue health without focusing on weight by shifting their attention to sustainable habits instead of numbers on a scale. This includes eating with awareness, honoring hunger cues, adding gentle nutrition, moving their bodies in enjoyable ways, supporting mental and emotional wellbeing, improving sleep, and reducing stress.
This weight-neutral approach helps clients build long-term wellbeing. It allows them to care for their body without the pressure of dieting, restriction, or chasing a “goal weight.” This is the heart of weight and health without dieting.
[00:00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food Podcast, my sisters. I’m your host Stephanie Dodier, and in today’s Coach Corner episode, I’m answering only one question, but one question that will take me more air timed answer because it is a very complex question, but also a super important question for people in our field, which is the whole topic of.
[00:00:23] Stephanie: Health and weight, it’s a practitioner who’s had a client come in with a prescription, her client got a prescription that she needed to lose weight to be healthier. How do we handle that in our practice? Now, before we go on to answering this question, if you love these short podcast episode answering very specific question that you have in your practice, I would highly recommend you go grab.
[00:00:50] Stephanie: Coach Corner Vault. It’s my on-demand library of over 50 mini trainings on coaching, [00:01:00] behavior mindset, body image, eating behavior, and even some business coaching, specifically around marketing and taking action to sell your services. If you want into that free library, you can go to stephaniedodier.com/coach-corner, or in the show note associated with this podcast.
[00:01:24] Stephanie: Ready? Let’s dive into the question. So this came from our annual survey where a practitioner was facing a client who specifically was prescribed weight loss as a way to get. Quote, unquote, healthier. Now, I do not have the very specific health concern or health issue that this client was facing, so we’ll keep it at the highest level possible when we’re talking about being healthier.
[00:01:55] Stephanie: So how can we support our client with confidence on this [00:02:00] particular topic? Now, first I want lay some context. Most of us as health, professional health coaches, clinician. We have been trained in our degree, in our master degree even I’ve had some client who have PhD. We’ve received educational academic training that weight equals health.
[00:02:29] Stephanie: So it’s 100% normal that you are coming to the non diet world, the anti- diet world, and there’s a deep conflict within you based on what you’ve spent in some cases years studying and what you are now coming to realize that health. Doesn’t equal weight. So there’s a deep period of confusion and that’s typically my ideal client.
[00:02:56] Stephanie: So you’re likely listening to this particular podcast [00:03:00] episode because you are in that phase of transition. You’ve received a training, you have an educational background, you have a license that taught you that health equal weight. But you’ve recognized in the course of your practice that it actually isn’t true that you have clients that are in what is considered a thin body or quote unquote normal range BMI, and they are sicker than other of your patients.
[00:03:32] Stephanie: And you’ve also seen the harm that diets cause to your patients. You’ve seen the harm of weight stigma of client coming in complete despair because they’ve been told to once again, quote unquote, lose weight to be healthier. So you are in the right place, and that’s why I decided to take the entire 15 minutes of this podcast episode to unpack this.
[00:03:59] Stephanie: So [00:04:00] we’re gonna go back to the basic and we’ll talk about the BMI because this particular client was Wade in our appointment with her medical doctor and was told that her BMI was in a higher range, and therefore she needed to lose weight to be quote unquote, healthier. So a little bit of background on the BMI.
[00:04:23] Stephanie: The BMI was created 200 years ago by a mathematician. It was for insurance classification of population. That was a tool that was created for insurance base needs. It was never created to assess individual health. Even the creator of the BMI said it should never actually be used to evaluate people’s health or even body fatness.
[00:04:54] Stephanie: Unfortunately, in today’s world now, it is still being used [00:05:00] heavily, but it’s starting to change. And I’ll give you some hope here in Canada, in 2021, there was a guidance issue to medical doctor to not use the BMI and not weigh patients in practice unless absolutely necessary because of the harm that weight stigma causes.
[00:05:24] Stephanie: So you may not be from Canada, but I just wanna shine some light for you that changes is coming. But unfortunately today it is still a tool that’s being used, but it has large limitation because a single number, which is basically the weight divided by height, cannot begin to express the complexity of human body.
[00:05:49] Stephanie: So BMI is not health tool. And that’s very important that you pass on this knowledge to your client that understand why [00:06:00] BMI, even though it is something that was told to them by their medical doctor, may not be a measure of health.
[00:06:07] Stephanie: Now let’s talk about the concept of quote being overweight, Because very often people are labeled as overweight because of the BMI. So let’s put the aside for one minute and just talk about the concept of being overweight, being over which weight. When we talk about ourselves being overweight, my first question is, you’re over which weight.
[00:06:33] Stephanie: Very often when someone says that, they say, well, the BMI, I’m over the weight that I should be at based on the BMI. Being overweight, BMI based or not assumes that is one correct weight for people in this particular type of body. Think about that for a minute. Is there a chart that human [00:07:00] being were downloaded into that says, if you’re this type of body, you should be at this weight, disregarding the uniqueness mentally, emotionally, spiritually, of this particular individual.
[00:07:14] Stephanie: Just say, you are in this body. You should be at this weight. Now the word obese goes even further. Obesity assign an illness to people based on their weight and completely disregard the actual health marker of this individual. It says, if you are this weight, you are obese, therefore you have an illness.
[00:07:40] Stephanie: That’s even more ridiculous because again, if we adhere to the concept of obesity, If we believe in that and we apply it to ourselves, it means that all the people that are not categorized as obese are healthy. Is that what you see in your life? And this is my key exercise. I’m gonna show this.[00:08:00]
[00:08:01] Stephanie: This is the most impactful exercise I’ve ever done with my client in practice. It came after years of struggling trying to help my client understand that health doesn’t equal weight. I don’t know where I found this exercise, to be honest with you, or this is just me that founded, but here it is.
[00:08:19] Stephanie: So when we go to this conversation with my client, we talk about the BMI, the concept of being overweight and obesity, and then I ask them to close their eyes and imagine their close social network, their parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncle cousins, even niece and nephew, like their close family circle.
[00:08:43] Stephanie: And to imagine them standing in front of them. Because they’re close to them, they understand their medical background, or at least at high level, understand if people have or been diagnosed with particular disease. And I ask them to go through in their mind one by one and look at their body [00:09:00] size and their health status of what they know of their health.
[00:09:02] Stephanie: And I want them to tell me is their people, as you’re looking at this lineup of people that are in normal-sized body, according to the society standard and that have or had in the past health conditions. And right away they’re like, oh yeah, aunt Jenny, my cousin Julie, my brother Mark. Oh, my brother Mark is a marathoner.
[00:09:27] Stephanie: And my God, he was diagnosed with cancer. How’s that possible? He’s so thin and he is so slim and he’s so healthy, but he has cancer. And then as they’re saying this to me, they’re starting to realize, oh, and they have this. They’re talking about their brother. I’m like, okay, keep going. And then they keep going through the lineup and usually by the 10th person in the lineup, in their mind, they’re like, oh, I see what you mean.
[00:09:58] Stephanie: Yeah, [00:10:00] like the size of the body doesn’t necessarily reflect their health status. Now, psychologically, why it’s, important for our client to do that with people that they know is because we give more value to factual information that we see in our own life that we have emotional attachment to than statistic on black and white paper.
[00:10:23] Stephanie: So this exercise that I do with clients is very powerful because it brings this very, new notion that health doesn’t equal weight into their life.
[00:10:36] Stephanie: When we come out of this experience, that’s when we can start talking about actually what is health? If health is not your weight, what is health and how do we determine health? Is health simply the absence of disease? Is health your capacity to actually live your [00:11:00] life? What is health for you and once people remove the notion of health and weight, that’s when the field becomes what I call it, like a blank canvas. They can get to put in the definition that they want of what is health for them.
[00:11:20] Stephanie: And one thing that we get to a place in this collaborative coaching model is that health is not simple. Health is complex. Health cannot determine by weight. Therefore, pursuing weight loss doesn’t guarantee health and doesn’t guarantee health improvement. And usually there’s a dissonance at this point of the conversation.
[00:11:48] Stephanie: Because we have to understand that belief systems. Our thoughts that we’ve been thinking for years and decades. That’s what a belief is. [00:12:00] So when we believe that health equal weight, it’s not because it’s been quote unquote embedded in our brain at birth. It’s something that we grew as something we believe in over the years.
[00:12:12] Stephanie: So by the time we get to 40, 50 years old, that belief has a strong anchor in our brain and our nervous system. So releasing or changing, that belief will take time. So when we start unpacking that with our client, it’s gonna be over multiple session. And when we get to the point we say, well if weight loss doesn’t guarantee health.
[00:12:38] Stephanie: Therefore, for me going on a diet, it’s not gonna guarantee that my health condition is gonna be better. So now what? If it’s not as simple as losing weight, how am I gonna get better?
[00:12:55] Stephanie: And this is when the door is open for a weight neutral [00:13:00] approach to health, where we remove the notion of body weight and weight loss out of the equation. Actually focus on behavior that have proven to have an impact on health marker. By the way, is weight loss a health promoting behavior? No. Weight loss is the outcome of the behavior of dieting, restricting food, and over exercising.
[00:13:33] Stephanie: Weight loss is not health promoting behavior. It’s an outcome of a dieting behavior. So if we’re not gonna help our client diet, if we’re not gonna focus on weight loss, what else are we doing with our client?
[00:13:48] Stephanie: Now we’re coming to the end of this podcast. This is another long podcast episode that I could do of what is the weight neutral approach to health, and what do we [00:14:00] focus in our practice with our client. I’m gonna give you kind of a short shortlist here, but I wanna refer you to a podcast that I recorded years ago.
[00:14:10] Stephanie: Podcast episode 312. The title is Eight Steps to Be Healthier Without Weight Loss. And for 40 minutes I go into the great details of what eight things that we can do to improve our health without attaching it to weight loss. Here’s a couple thoughts for you. Moving our body, exercising in any way, shape or form has proven to be one of the most effective method of changing health markers
[00:14:42] Stephanie: Now, you’re gonna say that to your client, they’re gonna say, oh my God, I know. And then , they’re gonna go into, oh, it’s so hard and I can’t be consistent, and I’m on and off and I struggle. And this is where coaching comes in. When we say coach behavior. Don’t coach [00:15:00] body. Now this is the work to do with our client, the behavior of moving body and start unpacking why it’s so difficult for them to move their body.
[00:15:11] Stephanie: Why they have resisted it, did it, overdid it, not done it like the yo-yo of moving the body so that we can help them rebuild their behavior of moving their body with joy. And with consistency. So moving your body is number one. All the eating pattern, Normal eating pattern. Gentle nutrition.
[00:15:38] Stephanie: Now when we open the Pandora box of Gentle Nutrition, what patients and client want is right away. Tell me what to eat like Actually, no. If you wanna have sustainable health promoting behavior around food for the rest of your life, because that’s your goal, right? You just don’t want to be quote, healthier for the next six months [00:16:00] and then not be healthier.
[00:16:01] Stephanie: You wanna find a way of eating normally for the rest of your life that includes fruits and vegetables, The concept of absolutely I want to, but, and then they’re gonna tell you why it’s so hard for them, and most likely is one of two things. They’ve been on a diet before. They’ve restricted food and they’ve had the bounce back behavior of eating all the food they were restricted, quote unquote, overeating and right all the on and off behavior around food and just like movement. Your work as someone who coach health promoting behavior is unpack it. Help them see why they’re struggling with consistently eating normally in gentle nutrition and rebuild that behavior with them for the rest of their life.
[00:16:50] Stephanie: Also, here’s a third thing, broadening the scope of help beyond physicality. Again, most of your clients will come [00:17:00] into you thinking health is physical, but in fact, as you know, health is way beyond physicality. Health is emotions. Emotional health, mental health. Yes, physical health, but also spiritual wellbeing, and that’s the definition of health that is most agreed upon, and it’s from the World Health Organization.
[00:17:24] Stephanie: That health is more than physical. It’s mental, emotional, and spiritual slash social wellbeing. That’s what we do. We help people specifically when we are a cognitive behavior coach, we can help people with mental health and we can help people with emotional wellbeing because that’s part of health.
[00:17:46] Stephanie: Helping our client manage their emotion, being able to welcome their emotion and not get stuck in them. When we’re talking about mental health, that’s the whole world of thought [00:18:00] work where we can actually decide what goes on in our brain and the impact of both mental and emotional health on our physical health is tremendous because it’s the core of behavioral implementation.
[00:18:16] Stephanie: The reason why people struggle with example, movement and gentle nutrition behavior, it’s not because they don’t know that’s important for them. In fact, they know they should be moving three to four times a week and they know they should be eating more fruits and vegetables. But they’re not doing it.
[00:18:34] Stephanie: Why? Because of mental and emotional wellbeing. That’s where we come in. That’s where we coach the behavior associated with mental health and emotional wellbeing. Then we can get into the world of sleep. What takes people away from sleeping? Most people, I wanna say like 95% [00:19:00] of educated human being know they should be sleeping seven to eight hours a night.
[00:19:06] Stephanie: But they don’t why? That’s when we come in. That’s weight neutral health, where we then unpack the whole world of sleeping and help them address the reason why they’re not sleeping, so they can get in time to seven to eight hour of sleep.
[00:19:25] Stephanie: Highly recommend that you go and listen to Podcast 312 where we unpack more of these health promoting behavior that have nothing to do with body weight. So when your client comes to you and say, my doctor told me that I quote, needed to lose weight to be healthier, there’s a lot to unpack there. You have to be both a mentor, someone that teaches new facts like the BMI, the word overweight.
[00:19:58] Stephanie: Teach your client about weight stigma. [00:20:00] Bring your client into what is health, and then introduce them to weight neutral health, and then talk about health promoting behavior. That is our response to this notion of needing to lose weight for health condition
[00:20:16] Stephanie: If this is the kind of coaching you want to master, particularly behavioral coaching, helping your client unpack why they can’t have the behavior they know they should have in order for them to have a better wellbeing. This is what we teach inside of the non diet coaching certification. It’s rooted in cognitive behavior coaching, self-trust, and in a weight neutral approach to health.
[00:20:43] Stephanie: Sign up for the wait list for our next cohort in early 2026. Until next time, my sister, I love you. Go out and coach behaviors, not bodies.
[00:21:00] wanna coach behaviors, not bodies. Learn the mindset tool and the method that create real changes.
[00:21:08] Join the wait list for the next cohort of the non diet coaching certification at stephaniedodier.com/waitlist. That’s where the real training begins, and I’ll see you on the other side, my sisters.
