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If you are subscribed to this Substack, you most likely know that I’m an anti-diet personal trainer. You may have also seen other trainers and dietitians describe themselves that way. But what does it mean to be an anti-diet professional? How does it differ from being a “regular” personal trainer?
Here is what being an anti-diet personal trainer means to me:
Not advocating for or promoting intentional weight loss
Anti-diet professionals don’t advocate for or promote intentional weight loss because it promotes anti-fatness or weight stigma and it can lead to weight cycling. All things that can have a negative impact on health.
This statement usually ruffles some feathers, but the pursuit of weight loss is inherently anti-fat. Trying to lose weight means you are trying to get a smaller body, therefore distancing yourself from a bigger body.
Anti-fatness, which stems from anti-blackness, causes discrimination toward fat people. That discrimination in turn can result in a multitude of health issues like diabetes, heart disease, and early mortality.
Intentional weight-loss requires us to diet (it’s rare to lose weight intentionally without restricting in some way) which can lead to weight cycling: losing weight and then gaining the weight back. That makes sense because most people who try to lose weight intentionally by dieting regain the weight they lost and more after a few years. That cycle of losing weight and gaining it back can have a negative impact on our health like a higher allostatic load (stress on the body) and increased fluctuations from our cardiovascular system (blood pressure, heart rate, etc).
In addition, the pursuit of weight loss encourages dieting which is a precursor to eating disorders.
All in all, promoting intentional weight loss can be the cause of individual health problems but can also contribute to systems of oppression. For that reason, anti-diet professionals don't promote intentional weight loss. However, most of them believe in body autonomy. This means they want you to make informed choices about whether you want to pursue weight loss or not.
Personally, I don’t turn down clients who want to focus on weight loss. I tell them that I won’t bring weight loss up, or anything relating to their weight or how they look unless they bring it up. That means that if they have questions about weight loss, they are free to ask them. But I won’t make weight loss a focus during our training sessions.
Educating clients about the harms of diet culture
Diet culture is the culture and the systems that prioritize thinness above all else.
Have you noticed how diet culture sells us the idea of implementing habits in the guise of health but really the focus is weight loss? That’s diet culture being sneaky. It knows that diets aren’t popular anymore so it had to find another way to keep us interested and purchasing products by disguising itself as Wellness Culture.
A perfect example of this is Noom which sells itself as an anti-diet program but stills asks you to count calories and label foods with a color system. Calorie counting and labeling foods as good and bad are diets.
Or Weight Watchers who rebranded itself in 2018 as WW to make it seem like they weren’t a diet anymore. However, when you look at their website the first thing you see is a pop-up that mentions weight loss: “Live the life you love. Lose the weight you want.”
Diet culture can be insidious. There are lots of ways diet culture disguises itself as general health advice (ie encouraging you to take collagen supplements) but when you start looking at the advice given and the products they sell with a critical eye, you start realizing that it’s not health promoting at all but about weight-loss, appearing thinner or fixing your body in some way to get you closer to the thin ideal.
An anti-diet trainer can teach clients to develop a critical eye that will allow them to analyze headlines that preaches new diets based on a single study done on mice and stay skeptical of products or diets sold in the guise of beauty standards and weight loss.
Not only can these products cause harm for the reasons mentioned earlier, but they can also be a waste of money.
Encouraging clients to listen to their bodies
We are constantly fed messages about how we should eat and how we should exercise. We are told to follow these external rules without taking a second to check in with ourselves.
Anti-diet trainers encourage their clients to listen to their bodies instead of listening to these external rules.
During personal training sessions, I will often offer suggestions to clients to see what exercise they would like to do based on their energy levels or preferences that day. Sometimes, they might even say no to doing a specific movement because they don’t like the exercise at all - and that’s ok! There are always options, no one needs to do an exercise they despise.
I will sometimes have clients who feel comfortable enough to tell me they are done with the session, even if we’re a half hour in. It happens! Sometimes we check in with ourselves before the session but we don’t realize how tired we are until we’ve done a few exercises.
I will also never shame my clients for canceling a session regardless of the reason. I personally don’t believe in excuses. There are reasons why clients don’t make it to their sessions. It could be because they were too tired, they had to pick up their kid, they got sick … whatever the reason, it’s valid.
Fitness should be a part of our lives, not our whole lives. And that’s where encouraging clients and people, in general, to listen to their bodies comes in. It’s about being flexible and opting out of exercise when we need rest instead. Because rest is self-care too!
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I didn't want to make this piece too long so this is part 1 out of 2 of What Does it Means to be an Anti-Diet Trainer.
In the meantime, I’m curious to know what being anti-diet means to you. Share with us in the comments!
😂. Imagine saying I'm an architect but I don't talk about buildings. Also the conflating of anti blackness with anti fatness is so absurd I don't even know where to begin.