Why I Don't Train for Weight Loss

by Taija Ventrella

Dieting and Eating Disorders

Early in my career, in my early 20s, I developed an eating disorder. It started when I started doing food journaling, at the recommendation of my boss at a big box gym, which is recommended by most fitness coaches who offer nutritional guidance.

The eating disorder I developed is known as orthorexia, which is an unhealthy obsession with nutrition and healthy eating. I took eating healthy SO seriously that, if I didn’t have time to prepare something healthy, I just wouldn’t eat. I wrote down every single morsel of food that passed my lips. I deeply bought into ideas of food having inherent moral value: “good” foods versus “bad” or “junk” foods. I never ate “good” enough for my impossible standards, I was losing weight and feeling terrible, and I was deeply unhappy.

I later learned that up to a quarter of people who engage in dieting behaviors end up developing eating disorders. (1) If an exercise was so dangerous that 25% of people who engaged in it got an injury, would we still do it? Hell no!

Except under the care of a registered dietician or doctor, food journaling is too risky a method to be used so widely, especially by professionals who are not properly trained in nutrition and psychology. Even in this case, it is a TEMPORARY tool for gaining understanding of your diet, not a lifestyle.

So now, I don’t do weight loss training or make nutritional recommendations to my clients both because I don’t want to re-trigger my own eating disorder, and because I don’t want to contribute to you developing one.

Weight Loss Industry

I also don’t do weight loss training because I’m not interested in being a part of the weight-loss industry, which is a multi-billion dollar industry that relies on us believing that our bodies are not good enough and are a problem to be fixed.

I believe that, regardless of your weight or shape or functional physical abilities, your body is magical and deserving of all of the love and care and respect. I'm not interested in being a part of an industry that tells a magical person like yourself that you're not good enough, or that you take up too much space.

I’m not saying that it’s bad to want to lose weight. I recognize that as a thin person, I will never fully experience or understand how hard it is to be in a bigger body in a fatphobic society such as ours. I understand that it must be very hard, but I suspect it’s hard not because of the realities of being fat, but mostly because of the way society treats fat people and does not make accommodations for bigger bodies.

This needs to change. I don’t have all the solutions, but I refuse to be a part of the industry that furthers the lie that it’s bad to be big.

If you are committed to weight loss, I do not judge you in the least bit, but I do feel that I am not the trainer to support you in that journey. I hope you find what you’re looking for and find a way to live your best lift, whether or not that includes weight loss. 💖

REFERENCE:

1. https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/sites/default/files/CollegeSurvey/CollegiateSurveyProject.pdf