Coaching that starts where diet culture leaves off
Your body was never the problem. Diet culture hacked your personality to sell you body shame.
If you've spent years believing your body was a thing to fix, you're not alone. You've been up against a $100 billion industry built to exploit how you feel about your body, then take your money trying to change it.
Diets don't work (Ragen Chastain has documented this for years) but anti-fatness, body hierarchy, and weight stigma keep grinding on.
If you're starting to see through the marketing lies, fed up with the discrimination you experience, and overwhelmed by how much of your emotional and mental energy has gone to how other people view your body – you're in the right place.
Where the work begins
After decades of extreme dieting, an eating disorder, and a long war with my body, it was a profound relief to understand how I'd been manipulated.
What started as curiosity about body positivity grew into something deeper: a real reckoning with how anti-fatness is rooted in racism and operates as systemic oppression. (Sabrina Strings' Fearing the Black Body and Da'Shaun Harrison's Belly of the Beast are both essential here.)
Around the same time I was unlearning diet culture, I became a professional coach and started walking beside people on their own paths toward body liberation.
One tool I find especially useful is the Enneagram, as it invites us to explore which parts of our personality were most shaped by diet culture, and how to reclaim Fat Joy as our birthright.
By now you know a bit of my story. Here's what it means for yours:
I don't coach body liberation from theory.
I coach it from the same road you're on – which means I recognize the hooks, the bargaining, and the exhaustion without needing them explained.
You can skip the part where you justify yourself and we can get straight to the work.
I'm a professionally trained coach with real hours behind me:
Over 3,500 one-on-one sessions, a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential through the International Coaching Federation
iEQ9 Integrative Enneagram Accredited Practitioner
Certified Group Coach
Certified Neurotransformational Coach
Certified Professional Co-Active Coach
Clients say is that being coached by me feels like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
The kind that gives you the confidence to believe everything's possible and the grit to go after it.
I've had my share of hard things too – divorce, miscarriage, illness, step-parenting, bankruptcy, family estrangement – so I know how much a soft place to land matters.
That softness is where we start. From there, we do the brave work of getting you back into being at choice with your life.
“Sophia brings a great deal of intelligence, compassion and warmth to her work as a coach.
She has a hard-won personal sense of confidence stemming from her own evolution and experiences, and this has made her both a strong person and a relatable coach -- someone in the trenches, as we are, and who has developed a remarkable knowledge base of coaching techniques and processes to walk us through.”
- M., New York-
Body Liberation Coaching: Begin Here
A single, 90-minute session where we map your personality pattern together, grounded in your relationships, body, and daily life.
Before we meet, you'll complete an Enneagram assessment so we can use our time going deep rather than getting oriented.
In our session, we'll:
Find the specific place diet culture got its hook into you, and name exactly how it exploits your particular motivations
Locate where that old programming is still quietly running the show
Map the patterns underneath it, including how they shift when you're stressed and when you're supported
Design two or three practices, built for how you're actually wired, that you can start using right away
You'll leave with language for what's been happening, a clearer sense of your own autonomy, and concrete next steps. This is a focused, high-impact session.
Online (Zoom) | $300 USD
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Body Liberation Coaching: Moving Through
This is a series of four, 60-minute sessions for the deeper, more sustained work that begins after you pull back the curtain on diet culture and how it hacked your personality. We take what Begin Here uncovered and put it into practice in your actual life, over enough time to make it stick. Naming the way diet culture hooked you is a powerful start. Loosening its grip, one real day at a time, is what these four sessions are for.
Across our four sessions, we'll:
Catch the old pulls in real time as they show up in your relationships, your body, and the hundred small choices diet culture taught you to agonize over
Work through the specific places you get stuck, hooked, or pulled back into diet culture thoughts
Build new practices that fit how you're wired, and adjust them as your life tests them
Strengthen your sense of autonomy so that being at choice with your own body becomes your default rather than the exception
You'll leave with more language, more insight, and the lived experience of moving through your days differently, plus the footing to keep going on your own.
This is for the person ready to go all the way through, to stop managing their body and start living in it, and to reclaim fat joy as the birthright it always was.
Moving Through is a good fit if:
You've done Begin Here and you're ready to go further
You want support putting real change into practice, not just collecting more insight
You know the patterns show up loudest in real life, and you want someone fat and free walking alongside you while they do
You're ready for the patient, repeated work of getting free and staying free
Online (Zoom) | $800 USD
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Leadership Growth & Career Success Coaching
Work is one of the places anti-fatness shows up most and gets named least. It's very easy to assume that something did or didn't happen because of your body size: that new job or well-earned promotion, not being asked to present to clients, the looks in the lunch room, bruises on your hips from chair arms.
I've spent over a decade as a leadership and career coach, with hundreds of clients across tech, healthcare, government, finance, and more. I'm also fat, and a body liberation coach.
Bring me what you're struggling with:
A team or a few direct reports you're struggling to lead
Burnout from constant urgency, deadlines, and change
A promotion you're working toward and not getting
Impostor syndrome, or the quiet fear of being found out
The daily toll of workplace politics and culture
That specific emotional labour of moving through your career in a fat body
In this 60-minute session, we'll get clear on where you are, name what's actually in your way (including the parts diet culture and anti-fatness have made hard to see), and build you a concrete next step you can act on.
This is a good fit if:
You want career or leadership support from someone who gets the fat experience without a word of explanation
You've got a specific challenge and want focused traction on it
You like a direct, warm conversation that ends with something you can actually do
Online (Zoom) | $250
You're ready for something to change.
Here's what's waiting on the other side of that readiness:
A relationship with someone who already understands the road, so you can stop explaining and start working.
Language for things you've felt for years and never had words for.
A clear view of the pattern that's been running underneath your choices, whether it's showing up in your body, your relationships, or your career, and a real sense of what to do about it.
Being at choice with your own body and your own life, maybe for the first time.
Remembering that fat joy is your birthright
Please reach out to book a Connection Call.
We'll get to know each other, talk about coaching options, and see what feels like the best fit.
“★★★★★”
Let’s Connect
Please reach out to schedule a connection chat and to learn more about coaching with Fat Joy.
