Diet culture has gotten a rebrand.
For a long time, the messaging was pretty damn obvious: lose weight, eat less, burn more calories, make your body smaller. Now, the language has shifted. We hear stronger, not smaller. We see wellness campaigns centered around strength, “health,” longevity, and becoming the best version of yourself.
And some of that shift can feel genuinely empowering, especially if you’re coming from years of believing that shrinking your body was the ultimate goal.
But it’s worth asking: Did we actually stop trying to control our bodies, or did we just change what the “ideal” body is supposed to look like?
I recently sat down with Abbey Roberts, registered dietitian and founder of Fork Diet Culture, to talk about this exact gray area. Abbey and I both started our careers immersed in traditional diet culture before eventually finding our way to intuitive eating, eating disorder work, and weight-inclusive care.
And one thing we both know from personal and professional experience is that leaving diet culture behind is rarely as simple as deciding diets suck and never thinking about your body again. [Listen to the Find Food Freedom® Podcast episode here!]
When “stronger, not smaller” still comes with a body ideal
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to get stronger.
Want to lift heavier weights? Hell yeah. Want to improve your endurance, bone health, mobility, or range of motion? Great. Want to move your body because it feels good, helps your mental health, gives you energy, or you simply enjoy it? We love to see it.
The problem comes when strong becomes another appearance requirement.
Abbey talked about her own experience moving from bodybuilding into powerlifting. On the surface, she had shifted away from pursuing smaller and toward pursuing stronger. But underneath that goal were still beliefs about how getting stronger was supposed to make her body look.
This is where campaigns like “stronger, not smaller” deserve a little more curiosity.
When we see these messages represented almost exclusively by thin, conventionally attractive bodies with visible muscle definition, what are we actually being sold?
Because strength does not have a look.
Someone can become stronger without becoming smaller. Someone can become stronger and gain weight. Someone can live in a larger body and be incredibly strong. Someone can choose not to pursue strength at all.
There is no correct way to have a body.
And if “strong” simply replaces “skinny” as the next body standard we’re all expected to achieve, we haven’t moved nearly as far away from diet culture as we might think.
Body positivity was never about ignoring health
This conversation becomes even more complicated when body positivity and weight-inclusive care enter the picture.
There has been a growing narrative that body positivity went “too far,” encourages people to ignore their health, or somehow requires everyone to love their body every second of every day.
That’s not what body positivity means.
As Abbey explained, the deeper work is recognizing that your body was never inherently the problem and becoming more critical of the systems telling you that it is. It’s about being able to take up space and recognizing that your worth does not depend on your body size or how perfectly you eat.
Body respect also doesn’t require you to wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and think you are the hottest person who has ever walked the earth.
You can have shitty body image days.
You can eat past comfortable fullness.
You can choose a food and realize afterward that you didn’t actually enjoy it.
You can feel neutral about your body one day and struggle with it the next.
Intuitive eating, body neutrality, and body acceptance are not destinations where you finally do everything “right.” Abbey described how her own relationship with food and body still fluctuates, but those experiences no longer determine her worth or spiral into beating herself up.
That flexibility matters.
“But what if I need to lose weight for my health?”
This is where weight-inclusive care often gets misunderstood.
When someone says, “But I need to lose weight for my health,” our response isn’t to roll our eyes or tell them they’re wrong for wanting that.
We get curious.
What health outcome are you hoping to improve? Is there a medical condition you’re managing? What has your healthcare provider told you? How has your weight been discussed in medical settings? What behaviors could support your physical, emotional, and mental health regardless of what happens to the number on the scale?
Because weight itself is not a behavior.
Our health is influenced by so much more than body size, including genetics and biology, access to healthcare, our environment, social circumstances, resources, stress, and individual behaviors.
Weight-inclusive care gives us room to work directly with behaviors that may support health without requiring intentional weight loss to be the measure of whether those behaviors “worked.”
Maybe you want to eat more consistently throughout the day. Maybe you want more variety in your diet, more fiber, or foods that feel better for your digestion. Maybe you want to find movement that you actually enjoy instead of exercising as punishment. Maybe you want to manage a medical condition while also protecting your relationship with food.
Those conversations can happen without prescribing a smaller body as the end goal.
And yes, this also includes conversations about GLP-1 medications.
Body autonomy matters. Someone taking a GLP-1 can still work toward a more peaceful relationship with food and their body. Weight-inclusive care does not mean telling someone what they are or are not allowed to do with their body. It means helping people understand their options, potential side effects and risks, explore what is driving their decisions, and make informed choices while reducing harm whenever possible.
Your body does not need to become a project
Bodies change for approximately one million reasons.
Age. Pregnancy. Postpartum. Menopause. Medications. Stress. Genetics. Illness. Disability. Hormones. Life.
And sometimes those changes are uncomfortable.
Body image is also about much more than what you see in the mirror. It can be your thighs chafing when you’re hot. It can be realizing your clothes don’t fit the same way. It can be experiencing a physical sensation in your body that makes you hyperaware of it.
Sometimes body respect looks less like changing your body and more like asking, What would make me more comfortable right now?
Maybe that means wearing shorts under your dress because thigh chafing fucking sucks. Maybe it means buying clothes that fit your current body. Maybe it means changing how you move, eat, or care for yourself because those changes genuinely support you.
We can approach those decisions with curiosity instead of immediately assuming the body itself needs to be fixed.
Because there is no perfect version of intuitive eating, body acceptance, body neutrality, or body positivity. What you need can change throughout your life. Some days may feel easier than others.
Your body still deserves respect through all of it.
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Want support without weight loss being the goal?
If you’re trying to support your health while also healing your relationship with food and your body, you deserve care that sees the whole picture.
Our registered dietitians at Find Food Freedom® provide individualized, weight-inclusive nutrition support without making intentional weight loss the measure of success.
You can start by checking your insurance benefits to see what nutrition counseling coverage may be available to you. We’d be honored to support you.
