Did you know that how you feel about what you eat can change your body’s response to it? Dietitian Lucy Carey dives into this phenomenon with strategies to guide clients from yoyo dieting to intuitive eating. Join the free masterclass for more insights!

“It’s just so frustrating because I feel like I’m doing everything right and I still can’t lose weight!”

It’s a sentiment I hear on the daily. My clients come to me having tried every diet under the sun. They’ve been calorie counting, making sure they are in a deficit, and following very strict rules about what they can and can’t eat. They turn down coffee with friends, they bring their own food to the family get-togethers, they go to bed with their tummies rumbling…

The weight may come off initially, but it always comes back. And usually more than before. So they start another diet.

It’s a frustrating, soul-crushing cycle.

And while there any things you can do to physically pull them out of this cycle, they will also have to change their mindset around nutrition. The mind is incredibly powerful. In fact, how you think about food can change your physiological response to it, as the Mind Over Milkshake study taught us.

In this fascinating study, participants were given identical milkshakes but were told they were either a high calorie ‘indulgent’ shake, or a low-calorie ‘sensible’ shake. The participants who drank the supposedly high-calorie shake had a markedly steeper decline in ghrelin – the hunger hormone.

Ghrelin helps regulate appetite and metabolism. When your stomach is empty, ghrelin levels rise, signaling to your brain that it’s time to eat. After you eat, these levels usually drop. However, in the study, we learnt that it’s not just the nutrients we consume that influence ghrelin levels, but what we believe we are consuming. The participants who drank what they thought was the high-calorie option felt full quicker than those who drank the supposedly low-calorie shake. What they believed to be true about the milkshake changed how their body responded to it!

Think about this in the context of yoyo dieting. Patients usually have set beliefs about food: that carbohydrates will make them gain weight, that they cannot stop eating chocolate once they start, that they don’t deserve a meal out if they haven’t ‘earned’ it through exercise. Food has become the enemy for them. These beliefs will certainly be influencing their hormones. Combine that with the erratic eating patterns that come with dieting (not eating enough then rebounding to eat too much) and you can see how it becomes harder for the body to regulate ghrelin and other hormones.

Over time, their relationship with food and their body deteriorates. They feel like they can no longer trust their hunger and fullness cues and the cycle of restriction and bingeing continues. So how do you break them free from this cycle and develop a more intuitive way of eating? Physically, you need them to be eating regularly. But mentally, what do you do? The best place to start is with your language.

When talking about nutrition with patients, it’s easy to focus on calories, portion sizes, and nutrients. That’s what we’ve all been trained to do. But what if we stop solely emphasizing numbers and help patients shift their thinking around food instead? Rather than labeling food as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, you can encourage them to view all food as nourishing in different ways. Some foods nourish the body, other foods nourish the soul.

A simple shift to neutral, non-judgmental language around food can help your patients immensely. It can reduce the guilt and anxiety they feel around food and stop them viewing it as the enemy. And now they can pay attention to how they actually feel when they eat. It’s a mental shift helps the process of reconnecting with their internal hunger and satiety cues.

Because the transition from yoyo dieting to intuitive eating is not just about ditching diets; it’s about rebuilding trust with the body’s natural signals. Years of restrictive dieting can dull these cues. That’s why so many patients feel disconnected from their bodies and say things like, “I don’t even know what it’s like to be hungry.”

It takes time (and a lot of consistent meals and snacks) to rebuild that trust. And your patients are going to stuff it up sometimes. When that happens, you want their mind to be in a good place, a place of learning, so they don’t spiral and revert back to restricting food.

By teaching your patients to learn their bodies again, you can guide them toward a more balanced, sustainable approach to eating. One that respects their hunger and naturally supports their wellbeing.

The Mind Over Milkshake study is a powerful reminder of how crucial it is that we move beyond traditional calorie-focused advice and help patients reshape their relationship with food instead. This shift is key to breaking the cycle of yoyo dieting and fostering more sustainable eating habits.

If you want to dive deeper into strategies for helping your patients make this transformation, join me for my free Disordered Eating Masterclass: The Roadmap from Yoyo Dieting to Intuitive Eating (and where weight loss fits in), where we’ll explore the steps to create lasting food freedom.

I’ll be going through:

• What IS disordered eating exactly?

• Red flags to be aware of and what to do about them

• The 5 simple steps from dieting to intuitive eating

• How sustainable weight loss can fit in with intuitive eating principles

Plus a live Q&A session with me afterwards! I’ll see you on the Masterclass!