If your clients say they don’t eat breakfast because it makes them hungrier, this signals a much deeper problem with disordered eating

“I never have breakfast. I haven’t had breakfast for years,” says basically every nutrition client you’ve ever seen, right?

So you educate them on the importance of breakfast: steadier blood sugar levels, more stable mood, less likely to overeat later on in the day, etc. But then they hit you with, “I’ve tried to have breakfast in the past but it always just makes me hungrier for the rest of the day. I find it much easier to be good with my food choices when I don’t have breakfast.”

This seemingly innocuous statement signals a much deeper problem.

If eating breakfast makes your client hungrier, it’s a sign that they have been restricting their intake – and their body is trying to make up for it. When they eat breakfast it’s like their body says, “Oh I’m actually getting fed, quick I better get everything I can now because I don’t know how long this is going to last” and increases their hunger hormones.

And if their response to this increased hunger is to go back to skipping breakfast, that shows how much they fear eating more food, most likely because they fear weight gain.

Yet the only thing they’re really doing is making themselves more vulnerable to binge eating and weight gain.

Their body sees not eating enough as a threat, and the body responds the way it would to the same threat in caveman times – by trying to put on weight. Think about it, if you weren’t eating enough back then, it definitely was not a sign that your life was going well! So when you did eat, it increased hunger hormones and suppressed fullness hormones so that you could eat more than normal and store the extra as fat. This was a buffer in case that threat came along again.

Too many of my clients who overeat after restricting food think the fault lies with them. They think if they had more willpower it wouldn’t be an issue. But that’s just not true. They’re trying to fight against biology.

So what do we do if someone says eating breakfast makes them hungrier? Encourage them to act on that hunger and eat more during the day. Side-note: if they can include some protein-rich foods with their breakfast that will help, too, as sometimes having a carb-only breakfast can make you feel hungry again quite quickly and we don’t want this effect interfering with what we’re trying to do – which is to rebuild trust between body and mind.

They may be fearful of weight gain with eating more, but this is the only way to signal to their body that there is no threat. There will be a period where they feel super hungry, but if they can roll with it, it will settle back down. It’s all building trust. The body learns to trust them that they will actually feed it enough, and they learn to trust that their body cues can be relied on and acted on, instead of being constantly overridden (think drinking water or chewing gum to try and trick their stomach into thinking they’ve eaten).

So the next time you have a client who tells you that they can’t have breakfast without it making them hungrier, that’s your cue to explore their relationship with food.

These clients are the silent majority. A lot of the things they say are so normalized you may not even realize they’re red flags, and they are convinced they need the very things that further undermine their relationship with food and their ability to be in tune with their body (prescriptive meal plans, portion size guides, healthified recipes of the foods they crave, etc.)

They often say something like, “I just want you to tell me exactly what to eat and how much I need.”

But that is the worst possible thing we can do for them! They don’t need more information on healthy eating, they need help rebuilding their relationship with food. And that starts with breakfast.

If you’re a nutritionist or health coach and you want to know what other red flags you might be missing, what shifts you can make in your language and your practice to help, and you want the cheat’s guide to my 5-step Food Freedom Framework… then you want my Disordered Eating Swag Bag! It’s completely free, just click to download!