You know this person. You might follow her. She might be in your professional network, your Facebook group, your inbox.
She talks about healing your relationship with food. She uses words like peace and intuition and freedom. She’ll tell you she’s not about restriction. She believes, genuinely, that what she does is different.
And then you look at her headline. Weight loss coach. Or her value proposition: feel at peace with food so you can finally lose the weight. Or the testimonial on her website: I stopped obsessing and the weight just came off.
The weight is still the destination. It’s just wearing different clothes.
This isn’t about bad intent
The practitioners doing this are not, for the most part, cynical. They’re not running a bait and switch consciously. Many of them have their own complicated history with food and their body. Many of them got into this work because they were harmed by diet culture and wanted to do something different.
What happened instead is that they found a softer path to the same destination — and the market rewarded them for it. Lose weight without dieting is a more compelling offer than lose weight by restricting. It’s also a more compelling offer than make peace with your body as it is, full stop, no weight loss implied or promised.
So the language shifted. The philosophy softened. The before/after photos came down. And underneath all of it, the implicit promise remained: do this work, and your body will change. The change is still the point.
That’s diet culture. The mechanism is identical. The aesthetics are different.
How to tell
The tells are usually in the framing, not the philosophy. A practitioner can say all the right things about body autonomy and still be running a weight loss business. Listen for:
The destination reveal. When I stopped trying to lose weight, that’s when I lost weight. Weight loss is still being positioned as the outcome — just with a more enlightened route to get there. The finish line hasn’t moved.
The “and still.” You can love your body as it is and still want to make changes. The “and still” is doing a lot of work here. It’s not wrong, exactly — bodily autonomy includes wanting to change your body. But in the context of a weight loss coaching offer, “changes” means one thing. The phrase is being used to make diet culture palatable, not to genuinely hold the tension.
The peace-as-strategy framing. Feel at peace with food so you can finally feel confident in your body. Peace is good. Confidence is good. But so you can turns them into instruments. Peace becomes a tool for getting the body. The body is still the problem to be solved.
The “without dieting” value proposition. This one is almost a tell on its own. Lose weight without dieting is a diet industry offer dressed in wellness language. It’s specifically designed to appeal to women who’ve been hurt by diets — and it promises them the same outcome through a gentler method. The outcome is weight loss. The method is just harder to object to.
Why it matters
The practitioners in your community who are doing this are not your enemy. They’re caught in the same system you’re trying to dismantle — they just found a more comfortable position within it rather than a way out.
But it matters because your clients can’t always tell the difference. The woman who came to you specifically because she’s done with weight loss culture has been burned before — sometimes by exactly this kind of practitioner. The one who seemed safe. Who used the right language. Who turned out to still be pointing at her body as the problem.
Your job is not to police other people’s businesses. But it is to be legible. To be the practitioner whose position is clear enough that she doesn’t have to wonder. Whose line is visible before she has to ask.
That’s what body-positive by conviction means in practice. Not the language you use. The destination you’re pointing at.
Janelle — Matriarch Studio buildwithmatriarch.com