It is hard to explain to anyone under thirty what AOL was. It was the front door to the internet. Bigger than Google. Bigger than YouTube, which barely existed. For tens of millions of American households, AOL was the screen — and for several years I was its Diet Coach.
That is what this cover is. Publishers Weekly — the trade bible of American book publishing — ran the AOL Coaches program on its April 14, 2008 cover, with the line “AOL Coaches can help your life improvement authors reach their full potential.” The face they used was mine.
What we were actually doing
Members logged in and got a coach. Daily plans, message boards, check-ins, before-and-after photos posted by people who had never told anyone their weight out loud. I answered questions the way I would in a gym, except the room held millions of people and never closed.
Yahoo had named me the most downloaded fitness trainer of 1997 and I had gone on Oprah in 1998 to explain how coaching through a screen could possibly work. Ten years later, AOL made it ordinary. Everything the fitness industry now sells as an app, we were doing then, over dial-up.
This photograph matters more to me than the cover does. Nobody in it is famous. They are producers, editors, and community managers at AOL Health who moderated boards at midnight and shipped features on deadline, and the reason a stranger in Ohio could get coached at all was them.
The platform is gone. The habit stayed. I have been coaching people online, continuously, for thirty years — most recently inside my private coaching group.