A must-read for health professionals supporting restrictive eaters
You don’t need to have gone through the same disordered eating issues your clients have in order to help them. But it can be difficult to understand how they’re feeling, so you can easily get frustrated when their progress stalls or they push back against your advice… Particularly when it comes to clients whose main issue is heavily restricting their food intake.
So let me tell you what it’s like.
Most health professionals understand restriction as a behavioural pattern. But it’s actually more like a relationship.
For many clients (and they don’t have to meet the full criteria for anorexia), the restrictive part of their brain feels like a trusted companion. It has been with them during stress, uncertainty, body shame, and periods of their life where controlling food felt like the only thing keeping them sane.
It was their friend. It helped to relieve some of their anxiety.
And here’s the part that often surprises practitioners: letting go of restriction can feel like leaving that friend. Even though they know the friendship has become toxic and is no longer good for them, they still feel deeply loyal to it.
Restriction is a loyalty bond, not just a behaviour
When your client begins to heal their relationship with food, you may expect them to feel relieved. But what often emerges instead is grief.
Restriction has:
- given them a sense of safety
- quieted those emotions and feelings they don’t yet know how to handle
- given a sense of predictability in an unpredictable world
- and even become part of their identity
So when you ask them to eat more regularly or bring back previously “forbidden” foods, you’re not just changing a meal plan. You’re asking them to end a relationship.
A relationship that has been harmful – yes – but also familiar and comforting.
This is the emotional complexity you’re dealing with.
Why clients resist even when though they truly want to get better
Your client understands the science. They get the logic. You’ve taught them:
- Eating regularly helps to regulate hunger and fullness hormones
- Restriction fuels binge eating
- The body cannot trust irregular intake, so the nervous system becomes a wreck
- Etc., etc.
And yet they… don’t do it. Or they sort-of do it, pulling back the whole time.
It’s not because they don’t believe you and it’s not defiance. It’s ambivalence. They simply have conflicted feelings about it.
Imagine telling someone to block the number of a friend who has harmed them…
and they hesitate, because that friend was also there for them during the worst moments of their life.
That’s the psychological knot we’re untangling!
Why withholding food feels “safe”, even when it’s not
When you skip a meal you might feel hungry, irritable, angry… But for some people, there’s a little sense of relief. A lessening of their anxiety. And for them, restriction often becomes:
- a coping tool
- a stabiliser
- a way to self-soothe
- and a source of identity (“Who am I if I’m not the person who tracks their calories?”)
Restriction feels calming for them, even when it’s physically damaging.
So asking our clients to stop restricting is freeing in one sense, but also feels unsafe in another sense.
Your clients may grieve the loss of restriction
What happens when you do block that friend? You grieve the loss of the friendship. Grief is a normal part of recovery, but most professionals aren’t taught to recognise it.
Your client may grieve:
- the predictability of restriction
- the body image fantasies it fuelled
- the sense of “doing something right”
- the identity it created (they were “the disciplined one”, “the healthy one”, etc.)
- the comfort of following foodt rules
This grief can look like:
- hesitating to eat
- conflicted around food (want to eat it but also doesn’t want to eat it)
- doubt
- slipping back into old patterns
- sudden waves of fear when eating more
When you understand this as grief (not resistance), your approach changes. You stop pushing and you really lean into supporting instead. It’s a subtle difference but it makes a big difference to how your clients feel. Less lecturing and more guiding. Not assuming a lack of motivation, just recognizing that there’s a loss of safety and being empathetic about it (whilst also sticking to your plan!).
This is why traditional cookie-cutter nutrition counseling often fails with restrictive eaters
Portion control, healthy food swaps, and those “motivational” accountability pep talks that are really just telling clients off…
None of these strategies address the attachment to restriction, the grief response, the safety function restriction has played in their life, and the identity shift required for recovery. In fact, these traditional approaches just make things worse instead of better.
This is why even ‘mild’ restrictive patterns can feel so deeply entrenched, and why your clients might make progress one week and completely stall the next. They have all the knowledge, it’s the emotional safety that they lack.
And helping clients with their emotional safety around food is a skill-set most professionals were simply never trained in.
So how do you support a client through this?
You honour the ambivalence and normalise the grief by talking about it. Ask them about it. Get them to verbalize it. Do they feel a sort of push-pull? Do they feel happy that they’re doing well and then next second feel guilty for feeling happy? A lot of clients feel ashamed that they feel this grief in the first place, so just validating their experience is really helpful.
Then help them build safety through:
- regular eating
- recognizing when they think diet culture thoughts, and challenging those thoughts
- expanding their tolerance slowly
- reconnecting them to internal hunger and fullness cues
- building more tools to cope that don’t rely on food
You’re helping them to break up with restriction, one day at a time.
If you want more tools to support restrictive clients
It’s a harsh truth that one of the biggest struggles that health professionals face is accidentally doing things that reinforce disordered eating instead of helping clients heal. That’s why I created a free cheat sheet 5 Mistakes That Make Disordered Eating Worse
Inside, you’ll learn:
- why weight loss goals backfire
- why healthy food swaps don’t work
- how specifying portion sizes fuels binge eating
- why intuitive eating fails when clients aren’t ready
- and the big-picture factors that matter more than nutrition
This is the perfect next step if you want to support your clients with confidence, without making the common mistakes that keep them stuck.