Business Coaches, Please Stop Using Weight Loss Metaphors
Read on Medium: https://medium.com/@katehuffman/business-coaches-please-stop-using-weight-loss-metaphors-9bebf894d9c7
Like many small business owners, I did most of my work in-person prior to Covid 19, the onset of which sent me scrambling to shift my services to a digital platform. Then, like many small business owners, I was thrilled to discover the advantages this allows. Serving more people in more locations? Um, yes please!
Thus began my deep and enthusiastic dive into the art of scaling an online business.
Early on in this process, however, my enthusiasm was stopped short when hearing a business coach offer this advice:
“You have to know your numbers if you want to grow your business. Think about it, if you want to lose weight, how do you track your progress? You have to measure — get on the scale, count your calories, track your time at the gym, etc. You cannot track your progress without it, right? You have to do the same with your business.”
My stomach flipped over. And it has flipped over many times since then as I have heard at least eight different business coaches craft some version of the same metaphor.
What’s the problem, you ask? Do I have a habit of eating bad sushi when I listen to these marketing experts? Maybe, but that’s beside the point.
As a body image coach, I deal every day with clients whose lives suffer as a result of having put so much of their time, energy, and money into programs that are certain not to bring them the results they want.
Those results, of course, being weight loss — a pursuit that our culture has deemed good and virtuous and normal and reasonable. This may be hard to believe, but in truth, it is none of these things.
Rather, it is actively harmful; we are told that we ought to be able to succeed in our efforts to control our body shape through diet and exercise programs, even though study after study has shown that dieting fails over 90% of the time. I’ll link to a review of studies that have proven this, but it’ll just be scratching the surface of the scientific evidence on this. Decades of research produces the same conclusion: dieting doesn’t work.
What dieting does do is create self-loathing, shame, and disordered eating. Here, have another reference link — again just a fraction of all the evidence available to prove this.
Why don’t we know this if it’s so universally true? Because the people SELLING you these programs only show you the success stories (real or made up), and they don’t show you these “success stories” several years later, when the weight has come back on.
So, we are left to believe that it is our fault that we failed, and thus we are shameful awful people with bad stupid bodies.
Are you starting to understand my stomach gymnastics a little?
I laugh through my nausea when business experts use this language because, if we follow their metaphor to its end, they’re telling us that their techniques are doomed to fail. “Oh, you’re comparing your advice to weight loss services, so, you’re offering me a 90 percent failure rate?” Forgive me if I’m not overly inclined to invest in your program!
Or, perhaps these business coaches are saying we must be mentally unbalanced to succeed at an online business? Because the only way to really succeed on a diet long term is to develop disordered eating. You can’t maintain a diet unless you sacrifice holidays, time with loved ones, social activities, etc. Is this our only option for growing a business?… Yeah, still not interested.
Don’t misunderstand me. I take no issue with the notion that we need to track our business metrics. How many podcast listeners become email subscribers, how well lead magnets are converting, how long each video keeps eyeballs, etc. — this knowledge is of course advantageous.
I’m simply pointing out that, if you are a business coach, using diet-based language not only contributes to the normalization of practices that cause measurable, toxic harm, but it also implies that your system won’t work very well.
Moreover, by using weight loss metaphors, you are bringing up feelings of shame and disappointment in your audience. A lot of people listening to you will have experienced failed dieting on several occasions in their lives. A LOT. You don’t have to be a body image coach to know this.
So how about instead, choose a metaphor that offers a little hope?
“If you want to grow a thriving garden, you need to know your numbers: how much water produces how many blossoms? How often do you need to add fertilizer to obtain a certain vegetable crop? Etc. You must track your business metrics in the same way.”
Already you’re dealing with a metaphor that will excite your potential customers instead of triggering memories of shame, guilt, unworthiness, and failure. Feelings that may cause them to turn away rather than convert.
So business consultants, I hope you’ll adjust your language. This would be kinder to your clients, it would be beneficial to you, and it would help make a more loving, hopeful world by phasing out one more area of our lives that diet culture has poked its unwelcome head into.
And I’ve never met anyone whose stomach squirms at the mention of a garden.
Unless they’re eating bad sushi.
Sources:
Statistics on Weight Discrimination: A Waste of Talent, The Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, https://www.montenido.com/pdf/montenido_statistics.pdf
Three Out Of Four American Women Have Disordered Eating, Survey Suggests, Science News, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080422202514.htm
Kate Huffman is an award-winning actor/writer and certified body image coach. She helps people reclaim the time, energy, and money wasted on the endless war with their bodies so that they can live freely and confidently in alignment with their purpose.
As an actor (Fresh Off the Boat, Castle), her work in film, TV, and theatre has won her an LA Weekly Theatre Award, an Encore Producers Award, a Valley Theatre Award, an Indie Series Award nomination, and several LADCC nominations. Her award-winning one woman show, I’M TOO FAT FOR THIS SHOW, which tells her story of twenty years of secret eating disorders and body dysmorphia, has toured around the country as well as internationally. It was the experience of doing this show and seeing how universal the story was — how many people out there were struggling with similar issues — that sent Kate on her path to body acceptance and body positive coaching.
Insta: @katehuffwoman
Facebook Group: Body Positivity for People with Bodies