A weight neutral approach has become the foundation of my work, not because it’s trendy, but because it’s the only model that has ever made sense for real people with real bodies and real lives. That includes people navigating higher blood sugars or diabetes risk, who hear again and again that their only option is to shrink themselves into better health. In this blog, I’m sharing how I came to this approach and why it matters – especially if you’ve ever felt pressured to pursue weight loss in the name of “wellness.”
If you’ve been paying attention lately, it feels like the whole world is getting smaller. Everywhere you look, someone seems to be shrinking – celebrities, influencers, people you haven’t seen since last summer. GLP-1 medications have helped shape a cultural moment where weight loss feels not just possible but almost expected. As if losing weight is the only respectable, responsible thing to do if you care about your health.
Especially if your blood sugars are higher than you’d like or you have a strong family history of diabetes.
Especially if you live in a larger body.
The message comes at us from every angle:
Losing weight is good for you. Not losing weight is dangerous.
But for all the noise about the benefits, the conversation almost never includes the risks. We rarely talk about what happens when weight loss becomes the goal that can veto every other sign of progress. We rarely talk about weight cycling, the losing, regaining, losing again, and what that does to a person’s body or confidence. And we almost never talk about shame, even though shame quietly shapes so many of our health decisions.
I hear it all the time: people avoiding appointments, putting off labs, dreading conversations with healthcare providers because they already know where the discussion will go. And it isn’t because they don’t care about their health. It’s because they care deeply – and they’re tired of feeling scolded for trying.
This silence around the risks is part of why I’ve started speaking more openly about the assumptions baked into weight-centric care. It’s also why I created the webinar Navigating the Weight of Assumptions – an evidence-based space to explore how stigma and weight cycling affect our physical and emotional health, often in ways we’ve never been told. If you’ve ever felt like your body had to get smaller before your health concerns would be taken seriously, you may want to explore it further.
But before we get into any of that, I want to step back and tell you how I arrived at a weight neutral approach in the first place.
I Thought My Health Behaviours Were Tied to My Worth
Long before I became a naturopathic doctor, my relationship with health was tangled up with a sense of personal worth. If I was “on the wagon,” I threw myself into every behaviour – eating, exercising, drinking all the water, checking every box. And when I inevitably fell “off the wagon,” it wasn’t just the behaviours that slipped. My self-esteem went right down with them.
It’s only with hindsight that I can see how much I had turned health into a moral barometer. I wasn’t simply making choices; I was grading myself. Disciplined or lazy. Healthy or reckless. Good or bad. My swings in behaviour matched the swings in how I felt about myself, and at the time, it all felt completely normal.
When I entered naturopathic school, I carried those beliefs with me. They were so deeply woven into how I understood health that I didn’t even recognize them as beliefs – I thought they were facts. But then, in my first year, I came across a non-diet book that cracked something open. It didn’t topple my worldview, but it created just enough space for a question I hadn’t dared ask: What if the problem wasn’t me? What if dieting wasn’t the solution at all?
I tried to take that question with me into my learning. I tried to blend what I was reading with what I was being taught, but it was clumsy and confusing – like holding two mismatched puzzle pieces and sensing they belonged to the same picture without being able to see how. Without a community or a framework to support this new line of thinking, I did what many of us do: I wavered. Some days I doubted everything I’d been taught. Other days I reinforced it without thinking.
That half-formed, half-baked tension followed me into my early years of practice, quietly shaping the way I listened to patients long before I had the language for why.
I Saw the Harm Before I Had the Words
By the time I entered practice, that quiet questioning I carried was still there in the background. It didn’t take long before real patients began reflecting back the discomfort I hadn’t fully named. They walked into my office with hesitation in their eyes, often apologizing for their bodies before we had even sat down. Some told me they had avoided healthcare for years because they couldn’t face one more conversation about weight. Others admitted they delayed labs because shame felt heavier than uncertainty.
And then there were my patients managing higher blood sugars. They weren’t just concerned, they were scared. Many of them believed they had only two options: restrict their food and shrink their bodies, or watch their health decline. It left them feeling trapped between fear and exhaustion, and I could see how deeply it affected not just their habits but their sense of self.
I saw the same pattern with my fertility patients. These were people longing for a child, trying to do everything they could, yet blaming their bodies every step of the way. They were told their weight was the barrier to conception, even when there were other clear factors at play. The pressure and shame often overshadowed any meaningful medical guidance.
The weight-centric approach wasn’t just ineffective. It scared people. It pushed them away from care, fed their inner critics, and made them feel responsible for things that were never entirely in their control. And if I am honest, I was scared too. Watching these patterns unfold only amplified the confusion and discomfort I had carried since school.
I didn’t have the words for it yet, but I knew something wasn’t working.
For 10 Years, I Avoided Diabetes Education
What made all of this even more complicated was how unprepared I felt to support people with diabetes in those early years. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help. It was that the only education available to me at the time centered on restriction and weight loss. And those were the very things that had harmed me.
Every time I tried to dive into the diabetes training that existed back then, something in me pulled back. It stirred up old patterns from my eating disorder, old fears about control, old beliefs about worth. The gremlins that I had worked so hard to quiet would suddenly get loud again. Critical. Unsettling. Insistent that I wasn’t doing it right.
So I avoided it.
Not because I didn’t care about my patients, but because the options I saw felt like a choice between betraying them or betraying myself. The model I learned told me that weight loss was the responsible path. It told me that managing diabetes meant shrinking your body, and if you couldn’t shrink your body, you weren’t trying hard enough. It framed everything through a lens of discipline and compliance, not humanity.
Looking back, I can see that the discomfort I felt was real and important. The model I had been handed did not sit comfortably in my hands or in my heart. I didn’t yet have the language or the framework to explain why, but I knew it didn’t fit. Not for me. My patients felt it too. And anyone who lived through the cycle of being praised for self-control one month and scolded the next for being human knows this.
That uncertainty, that quiet knowing, became the backdrop for what came next.
The Turning Point: Finding a Weight Neutral Approach
By the time 2010 arrived, I’d spent years straddling two worlds – the one I’d been trained in, and the one that kept tugging at me quietly from beneath the surface. After stepping away from Overeaters Anonymous and really looking at how tangled my relationship with food and worth had become, I stumbled onto Intuitive Eating.
It wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was more like someone dimming the noise enough for me to finally hear myself. Something in me softened. I felt myself settling into my own skin in a way I hadn’t experienced since childhood. For the first time, I could imagine caring for my health without being at war with my body.
That moment didn’t transform my practice overnight, but it laid a foundation. I began therapy. Over time, I started unlearning the beliefs I had taken in as truth. And I could see weight-centric thinking everywhere, in my training, in my conversations, and in my patients’ shame-soaked stories. And each time I saw it, the old framework made less and less sense.
Eventually, the shift became impossible to ignore. I realised I couldn’t keep practicing in ways that contradicted what I now knew to be true.
A weight neutral approach wasn’t just a professional pivot.
It was a personal one.
What a Weight Neutral Approach Actually Means
One of the biggest misunderstandings about a weight neutral approach is the idea that it ignores health. In reality, it does the opposite. It takes the pressure off weight so we can actually pay attention to what is happening in your body and your life. It shifts the focus from a single number to a fuller picture of your wellbeing – your energy, your blood sugars, your sleep, your mood, your digestion, your stress, your relationship with food, the way movement feels in your body, and the habits you return to when no one is watching.
A weight neutral approach begins with the belief that your body is not a project to be managed or a problem to be solved. It is a partner. It is a place you live. And when we stop treating weight as the measure of success or failure, we make room for questions that actually matter. Am I eating in ways that support my energy? Do I have patterns that stabilize my blood sugars? Where is my stress coming from? What does movement feel like in this season of my life? How well am I coping? What kind of support do I need?
This approach recognizes that health behaviours are not all-or-nothing acts of willpower but skills that ebb and flow with capacity, environment, and life circumstances. It allows space for humanity. For trying, stumbling, learning, recalibrating. For doing your best without demanding perfection.
And most importantly, a weight neutral approach makes room for you to build trust with your body again. Many people come to me convinced they cannot trust themselves around food or movement or rest. But often, no one has offered them the conditions where trust could grow. Instead, people have handed them rules and shame, both of which make it harder to hear the cues their bodies already share.
When we remove the pressure to shrink, something shifts. People begin to notice their own hunger and fullness. They feel safer experimenting with different foods because the stakes are no longer tied to worth. Movement becomes something they choose because it feels supportive, not something they force out of guilt. Labs become information, not a report card. Blood sugars become part of the conversation, not the evidence that they have failed.
This is what weight neutral care feels like. It softens the edges. The path feels wider. And you finally have room to breathe. And for many people, it is the first time they’ve experienced health care that feels collaborative instead of corrective.
If You’re Still Wondering What This Means for You
It’s very normal for questions to surface at this point. Many people tell me they feel relief when they hear about a weight neutral approach, but they also feel a quiet hesitation. They want to believe there is another way to care for their health, especially their blood sugars, yet part of them learned long ago that weight loss is the responsible choice.
If that feels familiar, you’re not alone. Most of us grew up in a system that framed weight loss as the gold standard of health, even when so many people found it unsustainable or harmful. So of course your mind may be asking things like: Is this safe. Will this support my blood sugars. What does this look like day to day. How do I know I’m not giving up on myself.
These are thoughtful questions. They deserve thoughtful answers.
And part of those answers comes from what we are learning through research. A 2024 systematic review by Clarke and colleagues examined programs that emphasized things like regular meals, gentle nutrition, stress care, and movement that felt realistic. Clarke and colleagues framed the review in an extremely weight-biased way, yet even with that lens, the findings were clear. Weight neutral approaches supported cardiometabolic health just as effectively as weight-focused ones, without requiring restriction or tying someone’s success to the scale. For many participants across the studies, fasting glucose, lipid markers, and blood pressure held steady or improved. Even more importantly, they were more likely to keep up with the habits because the approach felt humane instead of punishing.
For many people, hearing that their health can shift without demanding weight loss is what allows a little hope to come back into the room.
A weight neutral approach isn’t about ignoring health or pretending blood sugars don’t matter. It simply widens the conversation so we no longer reduce your wellbeing to a single measurement. When weight stops being the deciding factor, we can finally look at what actually supports your body. The foods you eat regularly. How stress shows up in your system. Movement that feels realistic rather than punishing. The sleep you get. The patterns that help your glucose stay steadier. The habits you naturally return to, even on the busiest days.
Some people feel grounded just hearing this. Others find that it opens the door to more curiosity. They want a fuller understanding of the emotional and physiological side of this work and how stigma and weight cycling may have shaped their relationship with health for years.
This is often where my webinar, Navigating the Weight of Assumptions, becomes helpful. It offers space to explore these ideas more deeply and to understand how weight-focused care impacts both our physical and emotional wellbeing. I’m not here to convince you. I’m here to offer language and context for the experiences so many people have carried quietly.
And whether you choose to join or not, I want you to know this: feeling unsure does not mean you’re doing anything wrong. It means you’re learning something new. It means you’re opening a door that leads away from pressure and toward possibility. And that is a meaningful step.
Conclusion: Where do we go from here?
Finding my way to a weight neutral approach grew from years of noticing how tangled health and worth had become, both for me and for the people I worked with. I saw how quickly weight could overshadow every other indicator of wellbeing, and how often shame pushed people away from the care they genuinely wanted.
A weight neutral approach offers something different. It allows you to pay attention to your health without turning your body into a problem to solve. You begin to notice what helps you feel steady, what supports your blood sugars, and what helps you feel more at home in your own life. And slowly, permission starts to replace perfection, and curiosity begins to soften the criticism.
So, where do we go from here?
Maybe it begins with a quieter kind of reflection. A moment to consider how weight has shaped your relationship with health, and what it might feel like to loosen that grip. Another moment may invite you to imagine caring for yourself in ways that feel supportive rather than punishing. And there is also the moment when you remember that your body is not the barrier to your wellbeing.
You are allowed to want health without waging war on yourself.
And you are allowed to take your next steps gently.
With you through the mess and the magic,
Kerri
kerrifullerton.com (Article Sourced Website)
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