434-Coaching When Clients Still Want Weight Loss

It’s Beyond The Food Podcast Episode 434

How do I coach someone who still wants weight loss?

Coach through the weight loss desire with curiosity and compassion. Instead of avoiding or convincing, explore what’s underneath their desire—like safety, confidence, or health—so you can guide them toward sustainable behavior change without centering weight.

[00:00:00] Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food Podcast. My name is Stephanie Dodier, and today we’re gonna talk about how do we coach when a client still wants to lose weight, because let’s not kid ourselves, weight loss will come up. It’s not a question of is it gonna come up? It’s a question of more when it’s gonna come up.

[00:00:21] And I’m gonna talk about this whole intervention that is known as. Putting weight loss on the back burner. I’m gonna break it down and tell you why it’s actually important. And at the very end of the podcast, if you stick with me, I’m gonna give you a brand new tool that I created to help you coach when your client still wants to lose weight.

[00:00:44] So with that in mind, let’s start from the place where many of us. Land when we hear the words, but I need to lose weight, but I want to lose weight. But I was told to lose [00:01:00] weight. And the biggest reaction is when we hear that in a consultation and right away our scarcity mindset comes up like, oh my God, she’s not gonna want to work with me because I don’t do diets.

[00:01:15] Is that you? I know that was me for a few years until I started to understand how the desire to lose weight actually emerge in people. And this is what I wanna share with you. I’m gonna teach you where that desire come from so you have a better understanding why it shows up in your client, but also how to meet it in a very productive way.

[00:01:41] So if you are listening to this because you go. I hate to say like in a freeze mode, in a panic. When you hear these words and you shift unknowingly in the world of persuasion, trying to convince the person that is [00:02:00] with you at the moment that says these words to you, that the desire to lose weight shouldn’t be there.

[00:02:07] And I wanna say this. I know for me I used to do that at the very beginning, way back in 2016 when I started shifting my practice to a non diet approach. I did a lot of convincing, I had a series of studies that was ready to quote when people were telling me, but I need to lose weight.

[00:02:33] But my doctor told me I needed to lose weight. Like I went in fullblown convincing mode specifically in consultation. A lot of my consultation weren’t a yes because I was trying to convince people I was gaslighting them. Now that I know what I know, I was a gaslight. I gas lit the people who wanted to work with me telling them they shouldn’t be wanting that, that they [00:03:00] were bad to want.

[00:03:02] To lose weight. So I wanna hold the space for all of you professional and coaches that you’re listening to this, you’re like, oh my God, that’s me. I hear you. I see you, and I wanna hug you because I’ve been there too. So let’s unpack the desire to lose weight. So you can shift your approach when you talk with your client, either in a consultation or during a session, and you can feel confident meeting them in that space.

[00:03:34] So what is the desire to lose weight? Wanting to lose weight is a reaction. It’s a thought, and it’s not a fact. And this is the first layer of teaching I want to do with you today. What is the difference between a thought and a fact? For me to visualize that for you.

[00:03:56] I wanna ask you this question. Do you believe your [00:04:00] thoughts. When you think a thought like, I need to lose weight or I want to lose weight, do you believe that thought is a fact? Like it’s a truth? Most people think that their thoughts, whatever goes on in their brain, and some say up to 60,000 thoughts a day are truths, facts.

[00:04:30] And I know for me that was where I came from and that’s where, so you remember when I said like I started the non diet approach in 2016 and I went into convincing mode because I didn’t understand back in 2016 the difference between a thought and a fact that I wasn’t trained yet in cognitive behavior coaching.

[00:04:53] So I perceive the desire to lose weight. And my own desire to lose [00:05:00] weight as a fact. Something that was truth, but it wasn’t. It’s a thought. A fact is undisputable it’s something that can be taken to a court of law. And be ruled for or against of, if you think about it in the science world, a fact is the causal effect in a research versus the association in the risk.

[00:05:32] So I want you to think of, you know, when we read a study and we hear association or risk, that’s a thought. Versus causal effect, which is a fact. So a thought is just a string of word put together by your mind. It’s an opinion, it’s a descriptor. It’s highly subjective. It’s an interpretation,

[00:05:58] it’s subjective to [00:06:00] the individual belief system. So the person in front of you. Create the thought, I want to lose weight because of their life experience, because of their identity, because of their beliefs about health that they were trained to believe because of system like patriarchy, like diet culture, like racism, like white supremacy.

[00:06:30] These system creates thoughts in our brain. These past experience create thoughts in our brain, and then we give the interpretation that we need to lose weight. We look at ourselves in the mirror and we’re like, oh my God, I need to lose weight. We give an interpretation. Of the reflection in the glass with, but I need to lose weight.

[00:06:52] Or if you work in the health field, people will get a blood test result back, like a [00:07:00] traditional cholesterol blood marker back, and they’re looking at the result, looking at the margin. They’re like, oh my God, I need to lose weight. They give the interpretation of the cholesterol blood marker result as I need to lose weight.

[00:07:14] It’s not a fact, it’s an interpretation. So when we hear the words, but I need to lose weight. We have to hear a thought. We have to hear, oh, my client gives an interpretation to their current situation with, but I need to lose weight. So with that in mind, we don’t coach the desire to lose weight away. We coach into it.

[00:07:43] We coach through it. Now, understanding that for many of us. We have not been trained to do that. We have been trained to hear a need to lose weight and then to pull out a meal plan if you’re a [00:08:00] nutritionist, to pull out a protocol if you’re a licensed health practitioner, and to give our clients and our patient a process to lose weight.

[00:08:11] Coaching through the desire to lose weight is not something we have been trained. We have been trained to see it as a fact and respond to it with a weight loss protocol. When I say coach through it, that mean we need to understand where it’s coming from. I want you to think of the desire to lose weight or the thought.

[00:08:32] I want to lose weight as. A tree with deep roots. Imagine the beautiful oak tree in a park with all these beautiful leaves coming out and all these big roots coming off the ground. The desire to lose weight is just the leaves of the this beautiful oak tree is just what you see, what is visible out of [00:09:00] the mouth in that conversation.

[00:09:03] When I say we coach through it or we coach into it, we go in the root system. We go in our coaching conversation, what’s under the tree? That’s where the coaching happens, in the root system of the tree, in the belief system. In the past experience in where your client learn. To interpret their current situation as I need to lose weight, and that can only be done with curiosity, with compassion.

[00:09:41] I remember when I was telling you, when I started in 2016 in the non-diet space, I experienced a lot of resistance from my potential client because I wasn’t having a conversation from curiosity. I was having a conversation [00:10:00] from convincing and trying to explore the roots with convincing with an aggressive Bram, right?

[00:10:11] It’s not working. In order for us to go below the earth, to go into the root system of the tree, we need to be curious. We need to have compassion. We need to meet our clients where it makes total sense for you to think you need to lose weight. Let’s explore that together. Again. We don’t coach away the desire to lose weight.

[00:10:34] We coach. Intuit, and that’s the number one question that we need to ask people is Why do you want to lose weight? I’ve shared many times on social media that that question that was asked to me back in 2013 was the most transformative question a therapists a coach ever asked me.[00:11:00]

[00:11:00] Because nobody’s ever asked me, why do you want to lose weight? And that’s when my trajectory started to change, when I realized why I wanted to lose weight. So that’s the first coaching question I want to give you, to ask people. I’m gonna give you more questions, so when you hear, but I want to lose weight.

[00:11:22] Meet people with curiosity, with compassion in them. Ask, why do you wanna lose weight? What would being in the smaller body make possible for you? How do you think you’d feel if weight wasn’t a worry anymore? What are you hoping weight loss will solve for you? What are you hoping will happen once you lose the weight?

[00:11:51] Can we talk about what the desire to lose weight means for you? People don’t want [00:12:00] to go through the motion of losing weight. They want to be at that lower weight. I call that the other side of the river. If you imagine yourself again in the forest, the same forest where we saw the beautiful Oak tree, and there’s a river running right in front of you, right?

[00:12:21] So you’re walking, you’re on the left side of the river or you see the river, and then you have to get over the river, go to the right side of the river for you to continue towards where you’re going. The river is the motion of being on a diet of losing weight. People don’t want to be in the river.

[00:12:44] Nobody wants to be on the diet, right? Nobody wants to be on the diet. People want what’s on the other side of the river. When people come to us and they say, but I need to lose weight, what they’re asking us [00:13:00] to deliver. Is what will happen in their life at the lower weight. They’re asking us to deliver for them what will happen on the other side of the river.

[00:13:15] They want us to deliver the happiness, the confidence, the health, the relief, whatever they’re imagining will happen on the right side of the river. That’s what they want. That’s these things that are relevant, that is these things that matter, not the weight, their desire of what’s on the other side of the lower weight is what needs unpacking true coaching, and that’s what needs solving.

[00:13:49] Now many of you are hearing that, you’re like, but Stephanie, I don’t know how to deliver happiness and confidence and I don’t know how to deliver that. I’m not a life coach. [00:14:00] I hear ya. And this is where coaching comes in. This is where in my world we teach cognitive behavior. Coaching comes in because the truth is the vast majority of people come to us because they want the happiness, the confidence the peace.

[00:14:19] And these are all emotion that are not created through a protocol. They’re created through coaching. Some of it, you may call it life coaching. I did a podcast a few years ago. Why I called myself a life coach now is because most of the intervention, because I work exclusively with women, most of the intervention that I do once we’ve unpacked why people wanna lose weight, they’re life coaching things like happiness and peace, they’re nothing to do with actual things that I were trained into to do.

[00:14:57] So, let me give you some example of what, [00:15:00] in my experience, of working with general population, again, only women. So in 2016 when I made the shift to take my nutrition to a non diet approach, I also decided to only work with women. So, in my world, for the last nine years now, what are the, top 10

[00:15:24] Things we find on the right side of the river. True coaching, I want less suffering. I want less suffering, physically Pain, knee pain. I want less emotional suffering, anxiety. Self-doubt. I want to avoid potential suffering. And that often comes from having been to medical practitioner and being told, oh, the weight is causing all your problem or your weight will cause you problem in the future.

[00:15:53] People don’t wanna be judged. They wanna avoid being judged by others. They wanna avoid being [00:16:00] rejected. People wanna feel. Safer. They wanna feel safer now. They wanna feel safer in the future. They wanna secure a safe future. They want more energy to do what they want to do. They want to look healthy.

[00:16:20] They wanna look fit. They want to fit in. People wanna feel better. They want to feel more comfortable in their body. They wanna feel lighter. They wanna feel more mobility. They wanna be able to go and do what they want without being restricted. They wanna feel comfortable. Wanna feel confidence. These are just some of the top reasons when you hear.

[00:16:50] I want to lose weight. And you think, okay, what’s on the other side of the river? These are some of the most common. So your job as a coach, as a health professional isn’t to [00:17:00] fight their desire. It’s to get curious, ask powerful coaching question and discover for the unique person in front of you what’s on the other side of the river.

[00:17:12] And that becomes the coaching moment that will change the rest of their life. Now I wanna address the putting weight loss on the back burner. If you’ve never heard that this is a coaching tool that is. Being taught very frequently in the world of intuitive eating and in the world of health at every size, this concept of taking the desire to lose weight that our client come with and say, we’re gonna put that on the back burner.

[00:17:49] , I wanna share with you my interpretation of the back burner and how to do it in a way that is not gaslighting to the person in front [00:18:00] of you in a way that doesn’t cause harm and in a way that actually cause healing. First thing first is putting the weight loss on the back burner never was meant.

[00:18:13] To tell you to ignore their desire to lose weight. Now, many of you hear that putting desire on the lose weight and you’re like, oh my God, this person is giving me permission to not talk about weight loss with my client. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what it means. It means moving the desire to lose weight off center so that your client.

[00:18:39] Can actually connect with health motivator other than weight loss. When a client still wanna lose weight,

[00:18:53] if they go into the work they’re gonna do with you, whatever that might be. [00:19:00] With the motivator of weight loss as their primary motivator, we know. That that leads to unsustainable behavior change and most often a long-term failure of that behavior change. More on that than just a minute. I have some little bit of research for you to dig around if you want to know more around that, but I wanna give you an analogy first.

[00:19:27] When we talk about putting the desire to lose weight on the back burner. I want you to imagine a stove at home with four burners, two at the front, two at the back, and let’s imagine that you made a big pan or pot of soup for lunch and now it’s dinner time. And you let the soup cool down on the stove and now it’s dinner time and you want to cook dinner.

[00:19:51] I don’t know, you’re having eggs for dinner, so you’re gonna take the pot of soup from the front burner and you’re gonna slide it to the [00:20:00] back burner. You’re not making it go away, you’re just putting it on the back burner so you can cook your eggs. For dinner, you’re gonna deal with the soup later, but for now, you have to cook dinner and you need the stove at the front, not the one in the back, so you’re moving the soup at the back.

[00:20:23] This is exactly what you do with client. Most clients will come in with the desire to lose weight as the main dish, as the front burner. And that’s what they’re focused on, and that’s what’s taking all of their attention. Every decision, every health choice, every emotion is tethered through their weight, their appearance, the way they look, their desire to lose weight.

[00:20:57] And what we’re doing is we’re saying, I hear [00:21:00] it. I see it. It’s there. It’s completely normal for you to have it there. What we’re gonna do right now, which is gonna move it to the back burner while we cook something new on the front burner of the stove. So putting weight loss on the back burner means it’s still there.

[00:21:17] It’s just not the focus of your coaching relationship. It’s no longer the primary reason for them to pursue health behavior, that they’re working with you, and it’s no longer the only marker of success. And when you’re having this analogy with your client, very often they will say to you back, yeah, but I don’t think I can give up the hope of losing weight.

[00:21:50] It’s true. You’re not asking them to give it up neither. We’re gonna work through it. We’re gonna unpack it, [00:22:00] we’re gonna break it down in pieces. We’re gonna look at it, we’re gonna investigate it. We’re not asking you to give it up without support. We’re asking you to put it on the back burner while we create new motivator for your health behavior, and then we’re gonna come back to it and we’re gonna unpack it together.

[00:22:18] We’re not saying you need to let go of weight loss. We’re saying let’s focus on something else right now. Let’s focus on your energy level. Let’s focus on sleep. Let’s focus on. Your eating behavior, let’s focus on moving your body. Let’s focus on self-trust. We’re gonna take a journey together to create health promoting habits for the rest of your life.

[00:22:46] We’re gonna cook up a different dish on the front burner. Here’s a good, coaching response I like to give in these moments and I welcome you to write it down and use it. What if we gave [00:23:00] the desire to lose weight less air time? Not because it’s wrong, but because there is more to you than your weight.

[00:23:15] When you take this approach, this level of conversation with your client, what you’re saying, I see it. I normalize your desire to lose weight. We are having an honest conversation about the desire to lose weight, and I’m still gonna help you with all the fears that you have related to your weight.

[00:23:38] Yeah, with that fear of rejection, that fear of judgment, we’re gonna help you with all of this. We’re not gonna let you on your own with that. We’re gonna bring that in, but we’re gonna approach it differently. Why does this matter? To not talk about the desire to lose weight, but instead to bring it into the conversation just from a different.[00:24:00]

[00:24:00] Angle, different perspective. It matters because ultimately, if we wanna improve people’s health, if we wanna help other people improve their health, we need to help them create health promoting behavior and recorded many, many, many episode about. The power of health promoting behavior versus weight, and how much of an impact it can have over someone’s health.

[00:24:32] Way more than weight. So I’m not gonna, this is not the purpose of this episode here, but know that there’s a number of episodes on the feed on that. If we wanna impact, if people wanna impact their health, the key is health promoting behavior. The challenge is the motivation, the motivator of these health promoting behavior.

[00:24:56] So if I ever heard this concept of [00:25:00] extrinsic motivator versus intrinsic motivator, that’s what I’m about to talk right now. So when people engage in health promoting behavior like exercise or health habit or eating habit to earn a reward that is externally regulated like body weight. It creates a if and then relationship example.

[00:25:29] If I don’t see result on the scale, then it’s not worth it. We’ve all heard that, right? and that relationship to the health, promoting behavior leads to quitting, dropping out internal tension, guilt, failure, frustration, inconsistency, meaning that when they see result on the scale, they do it, but as soon as there’s no result on the scale, they stop doing it.[00:26:00]

[00:26:01] It doesn’t lead to sustainable habit. It leads to it’s worth doing while I’m losing weight. But once I lost the weight, then the motivation goes away. And that’s the theory a lot around weight regain or . Betterment of health status is that the health habits that people had during their dieting period, while they restrained food, they also onboarded a whole bunch of health promoting habits, and once they quote, achieved the weight loss.

[00:26:36] Everything goes out the door and their health returns back to what it was before. And very often in science and research, because we live in a fat phobic research model, we assign the blame to the weight, but in fact, it’s. All the health promoting habit that went out the door, that caused the health to revert [00:27:00] back and that leads that whole failure model.

[00:27:03] So I mentioned a little bit earlier research on that. One of my favorite. Researcher on this is Michelle Seger. She wrote a book, and if you’re watching me on YouTube right now, I’m showing you the book here. It’s a book that was written almost 20 years ago. It’s called No Sweat, and she goes through the whole health promoting behavior

[00:27:24] The potency of intrinsic motivator versus extrinsic motivator, like weight loss. She did a number of study, I’m just gonna quote one. I’ve put two study in the show note if you want to go read on it. and the one study that she did in 2006 in midlife women, that’s why I picked this study because that’s my ideal client,

[00:27:47] Those exercising, walking for weight loss. were two and a half time less successful long term than those [00:28:00] motivated by stress relief or energy gain. Two and a half time less because of the motivator. It’s crazy when you think about that. So this is why it matters. And if we, we as weight neutral health practitioner aren’t capable because we’re not trained to have these conversation with people.

[00:28:29] Who will, who out there is going to have a conversation around the desire to lose weight that is not entrenched in restricting food and exercising more? Who will that lands on our yard? Like this is our puppy, this is our baby. We need to be able to have these conversations. So to help you with that, I’ve created a new tool.

[00:28:58] We’ve been working on it for three [00:29:00] weeks now. It’s a script. I’ve outlined, or I’ve written two different types of conversation that I’ve had no word of lie hundreds of times with people. One is a consultation conversation. The other one is a. In session conversation as I’m working with someone and all of a sudden they express the desire or the need to lose weight.

[00:29:24] I’ve written down the flow of a conversation, so it’s the exact word that I use in real coaching session with client. So if you wanna get your hand on that guide, it’s totally free. stephaniedodier.com/guide, or you can go in your show notes right now and there will be a link somewhere in the show note for you to download it.

[00:29:47] All you have to do is give me your, first name and email address, and then we’ll send it to you in a PDF and you’ll be able to read it right away. Also, if you’re like, [00:30:00] I need the training to be able to have these level of conversation with my client that’s inside the non diet coaching certification, where we teach you the cognitive behavior coaching model, the exact framework, and we practice it for five months straight with weight loss, with help promoting behavior, with eating habits, with body image on how to use the framework to have these deep conversation.

[00:30:26] Within a coaching conversation, we make a strong difference between therapy and coaching, and the way that I teach it is within the coaching boundary world. So join the wait list, stephaniedodier.com/waitlist and then we open. If you’re listening to this in a timely manner, we are opening the door, October the seventh, I believe, 2025.

[00:30:53] And if you’re listening to this after that date go to the wait list section on our show note and there’ll be the [00:31:00] next date for the next cohort. We have cohort 13 on October, 2025. So. I am gonna leave you with this. The desire to lose weight is an opportunity, not a coaching threat. Meet it. With that in mind, I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you in the next podcast episode.

[00:31:24] wanna coach behaviors, not bodies. Learn the mindset tool and the method that create real changes.

[00:31:32] Join the wait list for the next cohort of the non diet coaching certification @stephaniedodier.com/waitlist. That’s where the real training begins, and I’ll see you on the other side, my sisters.