Weight loss goals usually aren’t helpful at all. But how can you make your clients realize that? These 3 questions are your new best friend.

It happens every day. Your client walks into their initial consultation with you and they say, “I just want to lose weight.” Often it’s a goal they’ve been taught to chase their whole lives, and one they believe will bring them confidence, happiness, and (let’s get real) validation from a thin-obsessed world.

And honestly there is nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight. It’s okay to want to lose weight. Often it would be healthy for our clients to lose weight!

But focusing on it is very detrimental. It leads to cycles of restrictive dieting, binge eating, frustration, and plummeting mental health. And in the end, it usually leads to long-term weight gain!

We need to shift the conversation. But it’s not easy when our clients have been brought up with diet culture and when they’ve been love-bombed for having lost weight in the past. We could just bluntly tell our clients the facts of dieting, but that can feel really confronting. What is far more powerful is helping them to see it themselves.

That’s where these three golden questions come in. These are my go-to questions to get clients to reorient their mindset.

1. “Why do you want to lose weight?”

Most clients will immediately answer with “To be healthier” because that’s the cover they’ve been taught for their real motivations. Keep asking why though (“Why do you want to be healthier?” and you’ll uncover deeper motivations that have little to do with weight itself:

• “I want to feel more confident.”
• “I want to have more energy to keep up with my kids.”
• “I want to like what I see in the mirror.”

And here’s the kicker: you can work toward all of these things without weight being the focus at all. In fact, when you shift your client’s attention to building sustainable health habits (e.g. a wind down routine at night to help with sleep, some tools to better manage stress, including some nourishing vegetables with dinner), the rest often falls into place.

But the key there is that weight loss (if it happens) is just a side effect of their gain in health.

2. “Is it serving you?”

Many clients are convinced that dieting has ‘worked’ for them because they’ve lost weight in the past. But gently pointing out the long-term results can be very powerful.

If a client says, “Yes, the diet worked because I lost weight.”

Follow up with, “But did the weight stay off?”

They may say something like, “No but that’s my fault, I couldn’t stick to it.”

To which I almost always reply, “But if the diet was so hard to stick to, did you fail the diet or did the diet fail you?”

This is often a lightbulb moment when clients begin to see that dieting is not working for them long-term. A gentle probe of, “Is dieting actually serving you?” is usually the nail in the coffin for dieting, because when they really think about it, your client always knows what the true answer is: No.

3. “Is there a more helpful way to think about this?”

It’s tempting to wax lyrical about the diet industry making billions of dollars off something that doesn’t work long-term (and if you’ve been following me for a while you’ll know I could talk all day on that topic!), but clients don’t want to be told what to believe. Instead, this question invites them to come up with a new perspective on their own.

I’ve had clients say:

• “Maybe I should actually focus on feeling more energized instead of weight loss.”
• “I guess working on how I see my body and healing that body image is the most important thing to me.”
• “The most important thing is that I’m able to do all the things I want to do everyday.”

When they arrive at the idea of focusing on health gain over weight loss themselves, they’re far more likely to follow through with it. This question plants the seed for a completely different mindset. One that is actually aligned with true health.

These three questions aren’t about forcing clients to reject weight loss. They’re about planting curiosity, creating space for reflection, and opening them up to a whole new mindset around health.

And in all honesty, in my experience this approach is also the most likely to lead to weight loss long-term. But the beauty of it is that it’s a slow, natural by-product of their gain in health and happiness.

This is just one of the 5 Coaching Shifts to Dismantle Disordered Eating that I recommend. If you want to see the other four, just download the cheat sheet here!