I'M A PERSONAL TRAINER. HERE'S WHY I DON'T TELL MY CLIENTS TO LOSE WEIGHT.

IN MY 20-PLUS YEARS OF WORKING as a personal trainer, new clients have often come to me with fitness goals that include 'losing weight'.

- BY NATASCHA GRIEF

During their initial session, I push them to articulate specifically what that means to them.

Every person's answer is unique (although the terms 'toned' and 'muscle definition' come up a lot), but what they almost universally have in common is wanting to become leaner. In other words, their goal is to change their body composition by losing body fat and gaining lean muscle.

But leaner doesn't necessarily mean lighter. This distinction is so important, and it's why I refuse to use the term 'weight loss'. Words matter much more than we often realise, and just because a phrase is common doesn't make it accurate. When it comes to 'weight loss', it's important that we get it right.

Weight isn't just a metric, like max heart rate or respiratory rate. There are no morally loaded associations placed on a person's average resting heart rate, for example. A lower resting heart rate doesn't bear relevance to someone's worth as a human being in our culture.

Weight is different. What a person weighs is weaponised in our society, stigmatised, used to look down on another person, or to punch down on ourselves. For too many of us, that number on the scale becomes entangled with our perception of self-worth - and that can have damaging consequences. Even as we move into 2026, that entanglement is still loudly reinforced, almost everywhere we look in our culture.