I'm a Personal Trainer and I Never Tell My Clients to Go on a Diet

Let’s face it, we live in a society that directly and indirectly tells us that if we live in a bigger body—a body that’s larger than the normative ideal—our goal should be to make ourselves smaller. This messaging infiltrates our lives and our consciousness through advertising, media, pop culture, and beyond. It's everywhere.

In my industry, the fitness world, where I've been a personal trainer for more than a decade, I’ve observed the strong and enduring focus on how moving your body can make it look, rather than the endless benefits that exercise can bring to one’s mental and physical well-being. Weight loss diets are seen as the gateway to ultimate wellness. Almost every woman I know has been on some kind of diet in her life. But the truth is that weight loss diets tend not to work and, perhaps more importantly, have many negative consequences. Diets based on caloric restriction or avoiding certain food groups can make you feel frustrated and deprived and, because they’re so unsustainable, set you up to feel like you’ve failed if you can’t stick to them. Make no mistake—the dieting life can do more harm than anything else.

Still, many fitness educators and trainers focus on their clients’ “ideal” body mass index (BMI), which, as a measurement of an individual’s health, is deeply flawed. Beyond the fact that BMI isn’t a useful standard to chase, I believe that focusing on size and weight and, in turn, encouraging your clients to hyper-focus on their weight, robs people of the joy and fulfillment that exercise can bring.

As someone who is fiercely dedicated to empowering women, diet culture is not something I can stand by. That is why in over 10 years of training plus-size women exclusively, I’ve never told any of my clients to go on a diet. Here are some of my reasons why:

As I mentioned, diets don’t work.

For numerous reasons, weight loss diets don’t do what we think and hope they will do. Most people, even after losing weight, will gain it back. Why? Most weight loss diets are based on restriction and deprivation and ignoring hunger, cravings, and food- and eating-related desires. The thing is, being hungry all the time just isn’t sustainable.

I know from personal experience that being constantly hungry wasn’t something I could live with for any length of time. When the optimism and excitement about the diet wears off and the body starts to demand food and the mind starts to beg to be freed from restriction and deprivation, that’s when we begin to falter and eventually fail. Unfortunately, we often internalize this as our own failure, when in reality, it’s the diet that’s failing us. All the restriction tends to backfire. A 2008 review of 361 studies concluded that “dietary restraint may create biological and psychological feelings of deprivation that lead to greater reactivity to food cues, cravings, counterregulation, disinhibition, periodic overeating, and weight gain.“

Dieting doesn’t aid athletic performance.

It’s simple: If we are under nourished, we cannot perform at our optimal level. There’s no part of hunger and lack of caloric intake that builds an athlete. It’s tough to muster the energy to get through a challenging workout if you’re really hungry, or super tired because you haven’t been eating enough before you work out or refueling properly after you exercise. I encourage my clients to focus on getting stronger and improving their health—this is my job as a trainer—which they can’t do if they’re restricting their calories so much. Ultimately, I challenge my clients to consider whether they’d prefer to get stronger and improve their health, or continue to push against their hunger in the hopes that it will help them be thin.

Recommending weight loss alienates clients.

Recommending diets can be triggering for people and can give them the sense that they are not good enough as they are. Unfortunately, this is the message so many people with larger bodies get on a daily basis. I want my clients to accept themselves, not feel like they have to reject themselves until they lose weight (and therefore become “acceptable”). I work with clients to empower them, to help them discover how it feels to do something new or cool with their bodies. Recommending someone lose weight won’t make them feel strong, powerful, and motivated. It will make them feel like they're less than. Plus, I'm much better able to help people work toward their health and fitness goals if I don't focus (or urge them to focus) on size reduction and the scale.

Dieting can basically be an endless cycle and it can take over your life.

When I was chronically dieting my mind was constantly focused on point values, fat and carb grams, weighing myself, and measuring every bite. I was hyper-focused on exercise because the more I did, I told myself, the more I could eat. Exercise was never a source of joy but rather a tool to purge calories from eating “bad” food, or permission to eat more food. I would stress about “weigh-in day,” and once it was over, I’d eat ravenously as my “cheat day.” Sometimes after cheat day, it would get increasingly hard to reel it in. This cycle of restriction and "cheating" took up a lot of my headspace and took me away from my true passions and life’s ambitions. It made it almost impossible to enjoy exercise for what it is—a chance to be in my own body, to test its limits, to discover how strong I am.

Simply put, diets don’t work and they rob us of our true happiness and well-being.

I strongly believe that dieting doesn’t result in better health and wellness for women. All it does is take up precious energy we could be using to pursue our talents and passions in the world.

I promote body acceptance, even if you are on a journey to change your body. We cannot power the effort to become the highest, best version of ourselves with rejection and self-loathing. We simply can’t.

Louise Green is a plus-size trainer, founder of the fitness program Body Exchange, and author of Big Fit Girl: Embrace the Body You Have. Follow: Instagram @LouiseGreen_BigFitGirl, Twitter @Bigfitgirl, Facebook @louisegreen.bigfitgirl