Recent critical scholarship on bodyweight issues has taken a step back from debates regarding the veracity of claims made about the ‘obesity epidemic’ and its dietary causes and solutions. Instead, researchers have begun to explore the ‘truth effects’ of obesity discourse: how this discourse is translated into interventions that target how people relate to, and act upon, themselves and others. The study contributes to this scholarship through an analysis of a commercially distributed online weight-loss program, where participants are required to govern their own dietary conduct with the assistance of tools and resources supplied via the internet. Adopting a governmentality approach, I demonstrate that the program’s operationalisation of bodyweight and dietary discourse in its attempt to affect the dietary conduct of dieters is dependent upon techniques for governing conduct ‘at a distance’ that are derived from broader innovations in the techniques through which power is exercised in ‘advanced liberal’ societies.