If you work in the health and wellness industry, do you need to look a certain way for your clients to trust you?

“What would you know about it though? You’re skinny as can be!” She brushed me away with a fleeting wave of her arm.

“Yeah but that’s a good thing,” her friend countered. “You wouldn’t want to take nutrition advice from someone who was fat, would you?”

The two friends seemed to forget about me as they argued with each other over the relevance of my appearance in their hypothetical scenario. My eyebrows were so high they disappeared into my hairline as I inched ever so slightly away from the pair. I wasn’t even giving anyone nutrition advice, I had just been chatting while waiting for a coffee and one had asked what I did for a living.

Thankfully my coffee was placed on the counter a few seconds later and I half lifted it to acknowledge the friends, an apologetic expression on my face as if to say, “Sorry, I have to go now”, while secret relief flooded my system that I could get away.

It wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, nor would it be the last.

In the health and fitness industry, it’s often said that your body is your business card. If your job is getting clients to lose weight or gain muscle or become the healthiest version of themselves possible, they want your body to showcase what you can do.

For his 2013 research paper on bodily capital and health authority in the fitness industry, David Hutson chatted with 26 personal trainers and 25 of their clients. His conclusion for those personal trainers was that their body was indeed their business card.

But I’m not entirely convinced.

It’s true that your physical appearance does reflect your health to an extent, and this fact has been exploited in marketing. We’ve all seen the endless media portrayals of fitness influencers and celebrities whose bodies are the endorsement of what they’re selling. We’re hooked on transformation stories that visibly show someone’s journey to health and fitness through weight loss, gaining muscle, clearer skin, etc. The body is your business card proponents think that if we can look like what we’re selling, potential clients will realise that we know what we’re talking about, and want us to teach them.

But this is making some awfully big assumptions, in my opinion…

I had a teacher in high school who could rattle off calculus calculations by heart and honestly she came across as a low-key genius to a group of 17-year-olds… so you’d think her calculus class would be the stuff of legend, not something that every single one of us dreaded. We would moan about the class in whispers while we filed outside, and it was one of the few classes perfectionist teenager me condoned skipping.

She had all the knowledge, but she totally sucked at imparting it. We all sat open-mouthed and confused in every class, eventually giving up listening and trying to fumble our way through the textbook instead.

Because the thing about teaching and coaching is that it requires something more than just the knowledge of the subject. There are loads of people in good health. There are a ton of athletes who excel at what they do. There are boatloads of excellent cooks out there. But that doesn’t mean they can teach someone else to get healthy, or get good at their sport, or cook a delicious meal. They need to be able to communicate effectively, to adapt when their words aren’t getting through, to be clear in what they’re saying and keep it relevant to their particular client. Not everyone has those skills.

I hear a lot of grumbles in my profession about fitspo influencers on social media having much bigger followings than qualified professionals “because they show off their abs”. But I don’t think it’s just their bodies that are winning the attention of the masses. The most successful ones are are good communicators who peak our interest. Is their body their business card? Perhaps at first, but if their message didn’t peak interest, I don’t think people would continue to follow them.

And I would argue that when it comes to someone’s health, they want more than inspiration from a potential coach. They want relatability.

That’s what the girl was really saying when she called me too skinny for her to take advice from. When she said, “What would you know?” she didn’t mean that I didn’t possess a plethora of qualifications and knowledge, she meant that she didn’t think she could relate to me.

Relatability is so important that research shows that when it comes to dietary advice, patients trust an overweight doctor more than they trust a doctor in the ‘healthy’ range of the BMI scale.

That relatability takes health professionals off the pedestal we’re often put on, and shows our clients that we’re real and we struggle just like they do. It opens up a tentative genuine connection that we can build on.

I personally think that relatability is so important that every time I give a presentation or meet new colleagues, I purposefully go out of my way to eat in front of them. Normal food. To show them that I don’t exist off kale chips and celery sticks, but that I enjoy yummy food like they do. It relaxes them to see me being a regular human.

And what’s more, it takes the pressure off me.

Because there is an enormous amount of pressure in the health and fitness industry to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Honestly, I think we put this pressure on ourselves more than anything else. We think that our bodies are our business cards and that we have to be role modelling the gold standard of health for our clients 24/7. And that kind of thinking can lead to some pretty disordered behaviour.

When I was first working as a dietitian, I taught nutrition sessions in primary schools. Kids would recognise me around town and I put this enormous pressure on myself to role model for them. I would hide my chocolate in the supermarket trolley and I even went to McDonalds once in a mission that had me sweating in a hoody and parking a block away (you can read about that classic adventure here).

But I wasn’t teaching them nearly as well as I thought I was. Looking back, I should have been demonstrating a healthy relationship with food and my body, not an unrealistic standard that they could never live up to (and that I couldn’t live up to either). I wasn’t showing any relatability and I was destroying my mental health trying to be perfect.

So while some people may initially call me too skinny to understand their problems, the fact that I eat like a human, that I enjoy food, that I demonstrate a healthy relationship with food, changes minds faster than anything I could say in my defence.

If you’re a trainer or coach who cares about treating the whole person (and I’m guessing you are if you’re reading this), let me ask you something. Are you showing your clients that they can take rest days? That they can enjoy the occasional McDonald’s trip without falling to pieces? That they don’t need to perfect?

I think the way we live and our ability to connect with our clients right where they are matters far more than how we look. Our empathy, our active listening skills, our holistic approach to health…

So no, I don’t think our bodies are our business cards.