Coaching Through Weight Loss
Somewhere in my fifties, I stopped running and swimming.
There was no last half-marathon that I recognized as my last. No ceremonial hanging up of the goggles. I simply stopped finding the spaces in the week where those things used to live.
Work expanded. Caring for my disabled adult son required more of me. The swim bag stayed home. Runs became occasional, then rare, then something I talked about in the past tense before I noticed I had changed tenses.
Meanwhile, menopause arrived with its own fanfare. And bodies, inconveniently, notice these things even when we don't. Eventually, I found myself wanting to lose weight.
Because I am a coach, this presented the mildly irritating experience of knowing quite a lot about behavior change while simultaneously being a human being whose behavior had, in fact, changed.
But my desire to lose weight wasn't entirely about weight.
It was tangled up with health, certainly. But also identity. Agency. Aging. The athlete I had once been. The woman I am now. The choices I had made and the choices life seemed to have made on my behalf.
Which is why weight loss can become such interesting territory in coaching.
The number on the scale may be the thing a client wants to change. But it is rarely the only thing they have brought into the room.
Coaching Weight Loss: What the Number Means
A client says, "I want to lose thirty pounds."
It sounds wonderfully concrete. A goal you can measure. Progress you can track. We could easily begin coaching the plan: What will you eat? When will you exercise? What gets in the way?
Those may eventually be useful questions. But they can also take us straight into action before we understand what the client actually wants to change.
Thirty pounds might mean I want my knees to hurt less. Or I don't recognize myself in photographs anymore. It can mean My doctor scared me. I want to feel attractive. I miss hiking. I'm afraid of getting older.
Or perhaps, I miss myself.
Then again, sometimes thirty pounds is simply thirty pounds. Our clothes don't fit and we'd like them to. Not every practical goal conceals a psychological mystery waiting for an enterprising coach to excavate.
The scale cannot tell us what matters to the client, and neither should we assume we know. We can stay curious about what sits behind—or simply alongside—the desire to lose weight, and let the client tell us how much they want to explore it.
That distinction matters in coaching. Curiosity can deepen a conversation, but it can also become an agenda when we're more interested in what's underneath the goal than the client is.
When the Old Habits No Longer Fit
For a long time after I stopped running regularly, I still thought of myself as a runner. Identity has an interesting lag time. Our circumstances change first, then our habits, while our sense of who we are is the last to receive the memo.
We tend to interpret that gap as a failure of discipline. But habits live in ecosystems.
Running and swimming once belonged naturally in my life. Then the life changed. So did my body. A cranky hip made running less fun; a worn-out shoulder did the same for swimming. What had once been easy to choose began to require considerably more negotiation.
So perhaps the question isn't always, How do I get disciplined again?
When a client names discipline as the problem, we don't have to accept the diagnosis along with the goal. The old habits may have belonged to a different schedule, a different body, or a different season of life.
Rather than helping the client force an old routine back into existence, we can become curious about what fits now.
What would caring for yourself look like in the life you actually have today?
The Stories We Tell About Bodies
Weight is not culturally neutral.
We don't respond to losing and gaining weight as though we are watching numbers move on a spreadsheet. Bodies carry meaning, and women's bodies in particular seem to invite an astonishing amount of unsolicited commentary.
Lose weight and people may congratulate you without knowing why you lost it. Gain weight and they may become conspicuously silent—or offer advice nobody asked for. Thinness gets tangled with attractiveness, discipline, health, success, desirability, even virtue.
Those messages enter the coaching room with our clients. They also enter with us.
We may find ourselves cheering a client's weight-loss goal or questioning it, without realizing how much of our own experience is shaping our response.
The work is not to decide what relationship the client should have with their body, but to create enough space for them to discover what they want that relationship to be.
Self-Acceptance Is Not the Opposite of Change
There is a peculiar idea floating around that we must choose between accepting ourselves and wanting to change.
I don't find that particularly useful.
I can appreciate what my body has carried me through and still want something different for it. I can be grateful for a body that has worked, parented, played, gardened, traveled, worried, recovered, and kept going—and still notice that I don't feel quite at home in it right now.
Wanting change doesn't necessarily mean rejecting ourselves. Sometimes it means paying attention.
That distinction matters because shame can masquerade as motivation for a surprisingly long time. So can fear or nostalgia.
The coaching invitation is not to talk the client out of wanting to change. It is to help them hear the voice from which the desire is coming.
What does the client believe will become available when the number on the scale changes?
And who do they imagine they will be when it does?
Reclamation, Not Restoration
I've had to notice something about my own desire to lose weight.
Part of me would quite happily like my old body back. She ran half-marathons. She swam. She had considerably more available cartilage.
But she also had a different life. And, for that matter, a different hip and shoulder.
Reconstructing her would require more than running shoes and determination. It would require going backward in time.
That isn't the work.
The more interesting question is what movement, strength, health, and vitality might look like in the life and body I have now. Because some of what disappeared is worth missing. Exercise gave me solitude. Challenge. Strength. Time inside my own body rather than inside everyone else's needs.
Perhaps that is what I am trying to reclaim. Not the younger woman. Something she knew.
Our bodies carry evidence of the seasons we've lived through. Careers intensify. Children arrive. Parents age. Illness happens. Caregiving expands. Bodies change. Somewhere along the way, we can look at ourselves and wonder, What happened?
Sometimes the answer is remarkably ordinary.
Life happened.
Not as an excuse. As context.
Clients often arrive wanting to get back to something: an old weight, old energy, old confidence, the person they remember themselves being. We don't have to correct that longing. We can become curious about what from that earlier self still matters, what belonged to a life that no longer exists, and what might be carried forward.
There is a subtle difference between coaching someone back toward a previous version of themselves and becoming curious about what they are reaching for when they look backward. The first can keep the conversation anchored in restoration. The second may open something new.
We don't have to become who we were to recover something we valued about being that person.
And perhaps the most useful question isn't, How do I get my old body back?
It may be: How do I want to live in this one now?
Disclaimer
The reflections and interpretations in this article are my own as an ICF Master Certified Coach. They are intended to support coaches in their growth and practice.
