How body-neutral healthcare can help you manage your health without demanding you shrink your body.

You deserve good healthcare regardless of the size of your body.

And that means that the quality of your healthcare shouldn’t depend on your ability to shrink your body.

There are a plethora of diagnoses that are almost always followed by a recommendation to lose weight, and a wave goodbye. There are even more conditions completely unrelated to weight that still earn a similar recommendation if you happen to have a larger body.

Once that clinic doors swings shut, it can leave you swirling with questions:

• Are there any treatment options other than weight loss?

• What will happen to me if I don’t lose weight?

• What would a positive outcome look like for this condition, other than weight loss?

• Why wasn’t I offered any other options?

Whether you have a history with disordered eating, a moral objection to weight loss as a tool of the capitalist white supremacist patriarchy, or have simply realized that weight loss is never sustainable for you, you deserve healthcare beyond weight loss.

This is where a weight-neutral healthcare practitioner like me can help.

Is weight loss really the only option?

Short answer: almost certainly not.

Longer answer: the other options you have depend on the health condition you’re trying to manage, or the long-term risks you’re trying to avoid.

The most common concerns people come to me with, asking this question are:

• Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS)

• Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD, previously known as NAFLD - non-alcoholic fatty liver disease)

• Prediabetes or type II diabetes

• Hypertension (high blood pressure)

• Dyslipidemia (including high cholesterol)

• Family history of diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes.

I’m not going to lie to you - my goal is to give you all the information so you can make the choice that’s best for you - all of these do respond to weight loss.

And all of them also respond to changes in nutrition, physical activity, and specific supplements, while some also get better with interventions that build resilience. All of them also can be treated with medication, if needed.

So why didn’t your doctor offer any of those alternatives?

Ontario has a family doctor shortage

Nutrition and exercise are complicated interventions that take time and expertise to prescribe. Most GPs, and many specialists, simply don’t have that kind of time. For them, asking you to lose weight is the shortest way to recommend dietary changes and exercise. Yes, it’s an ineffective way to get that point across, and referring to a dietician would be way better. But if you haven’t noticed, family doctors in Ontario are stretched pretty thin right now.

The research supports lifestyle interventions

Many official recommendations from medical authorities require doctors to recommend weight loss, (or diet and exercise, which then gets short-handed to weight loss) before considering other treatment options. There are two main reasons for this.

1. Nutrition and physical activity often get to the root cause of your condition in a way that medication does not. So it’s better to address those underlying factors before slapping a band-aid medication on it.

2. Many medications are only recommended once the disease process has progressed a certain amount. For example, if you have prediabetes, you can’t be prescribed diabetes medications yet. On the flip side, lifestyle-based interventions can often slow or reverse the process so you never get to the point of needing medication at all - which is a huge win.

So if non-medication interventions are the best option, weight loss is off the table, and your family doctor can’t seem to get any more specific in their nutrition and exercise recommendations, what do you do??

You see a practitioner who practices weight-neutral medicine.

(Like me.)

What is weight-neutral medicine?

Weight-neutral medicine, or body-neutral medicine, as some folks call it, is healthcare that doesn’t use weight as a measure of health.

Instead, I use measures like blood tests, imaging results, validated questionnaires, how you feel, and what you’re able to do to assess your health and evaluate treatment success.

Instead of recommending weight loss as treatment, we focus on alllllll the other interventions that can help you manage your condition, slow its progression, and lower your long-term cardiovascular risk.

Let me say that again: I am a naturopathic doctor and I will never recommend that you lose weight.

If you’re determined to take charge of your health, and need a practitioner who will give you strategy that focuses on your goals, I might be the person for you. Book a free 15 minute discovery call to find out.