If you’re not talking about regulating the nervous system, you should be. Your clients cannot heal when they’re in survival mode.

When you’re dealing with clients with who are restricting, bingeing or yoyo dieting, you’re probably focused on what they’re eating, when they’re eating it, and the intention behind their food choices. These are all important – but unless you’ve done one key thing first, any nutrition intervention is bound to fail.

You need to calm down their nervous system.

Why are your clients dysregulated in the first place?

Your clients probably have a history of dieting, but what they may not realize is that the body doesn’t interpret dieting as a harmless attempt to lose weight, it sees dieting through a caveman’s eyes: as a famine.

Even when it’s voluntary, that food restriction signals a threat to the brain. This activates the sympathetic nervous system (the “fight-or-flight” state) and kicks off a cascade of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

Remember, this all stems from a time when stress was delivered in short bursts. Say there was a tiger was chasing you – in a few moments you had either gotten away, or you were dead. But these days, our clients get stuck in a sympathetic state chronically and it wreaks havoc on their health.

For example:

• Heightened food cravings
• Difficulty sleeping
• Difficulty regulating mood
• Brain fog
• And, ironically, long-term weight gain as the body compensates for the perceived threat

Often, I see clients who are in a very heightened state of stress and because their body has put on weight to mitigate that threat, they’ve respond by cutting their calories down even more, exercising harder than ever, etc., etc. And they’re so confused as to why it’s not working. They feel like their body is betraying them.

But actually, physiologically, their body is just trying to protect them from what it sees as a threat.

It’s not a failure of willpower and self-control. It’s just a nervous system in survival mode.

Real healing happens in the parasympathetic nervous system

If we want clients to heal their relationship with food and start to eat more intuitively, we have to help their bodies feel safe first. That means helping them shift into the parasympathetic state – what we call “rest and digest” mode.

In rest-and-digest mode:

• Appetite is more stable as hunger and fullness hormones start working normally again
• Clients feel calmer and are better able to moderate their emotions
• They can begin to get more in touch with their own unique hunger and fullness cues and reconnect with how their body is feeling – setting them up for intuitive eating

How to help clients create a sense of safety

You don’t have to have a whole other degree to support nervous system regulation. In fact, some of the most effective strategies are simple, practical things that signal to the body that it is safe.

Here are 5 ways your clients can start calming their nervous system today:

• Stop dieting!
• Eat regular meals and snacks every day
• Put food on a plate and sit down to eat without distractions
• Take 3 deep breaths before eating (in through the nose, slowly out through the mouth)
• Think or say aloud, “I am safe.”

If you’re not talking about the nervous system, you should be

Too often, clients are given too much technical nutritional advice when their nervous system is still in a state of threat.

But by incorporating nervous system awareness into your work, you help clients move from survival to safety, which makes long-term healing possible. Because when the body feels safe, the relationship with food can finally begin to transform.

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