And other things we forget as health professionals…

Here’s a hard truth we don’t talk about enough. We can prescribe the perfect mindfulness routine, breath-work sequence, journaling prompts, grounding exercises, or visualization practice… but if our client is running on four hours of sleep and two coffees for breakfast, none of it is going to land.

Not because they’re resistant, or self-sabotaging, or they don’t want to feel better. Purely because you can’t out-meditate exhaustion. And you definitely can’t out-mindset your way around not eating enough food.

This is the part where most blog posts pivot to softly placing the blame on the clients. But this is not that kind of blog post. This is about us – the practitioners.

Health professionals get shiny-object syndrome, too

Can we be honest with each other for a second?

Health professionals and nutrition coaches are humans, too. So we fall victim to wellness trends exactly like the general public. The difference is that we can wrap it up in science-y language and justify it as “supporting client outcomes”. I once heard it said that humans are rationalization machines, and I really do think that’s true.

I once had a supervisor who attended a conference all about keto diets and afterwards she really felt it was a good idea to start preaching keto… Until she attended another conference the next week, which changed her mind completely.

She’s not alone. We all get excited about new research (even if it’s not exactly conclusive) or new things that promise clarity, control, or quick breakthroughs. My social media is full of:

• fasting protocols
• blood sugar hacks
• the newest meditation trends
• mood-optimizing supplement stacks
• or whatever else is currently making the rounds on Instagram

Look. We’re smart, we’re empathetic, and we want to help… but we’re also humans. And humans love shiny solutions. It’s not that curiosity or innovation are bad things – absolutely the opposite! But they can become a problem when we get distracted by the new, shiny thing and the basics quietly slide down the priority list.

The boring, unsexy, profoundly important basics.

Many years ago, I had a client who seemed to be doing everything right. Insightful, eager, reflective. She was the kind of client practitioners dream about.

Except nothing we did seemed to stick.

Every appointment she’d tell me: “I know what to do… I just can’t make myself do it.”

So I gave her more tools. More strategies. More clever hacks. She loved them. But she didn’t actually use them.

And then one day, completely offhand, she said something that made my brain do a full reboot. She mentioned that her first proper meal of the day wasn’t until 3pm. “I’m just not hungry before then,” she said.

That was it. And I had missed it because I was so focused on answering her questions about the best things to eat and the best way to do this and the best thing for that…

And now suddenly it all made sense:

Of course the mindfulness wasn’t landing.
Of course she felt “out of control” at night.
Of course her emotions were unmanageable.

She was running on fumes.

Once we stabilized her eating, supported her sleep, and gave her body enough predictability to stop living in survival mode… everything changed. The tools she’d been “failing at”? She started using them effortlessly. Not because she tried harder, but because for the first time, her brain and body had the capacity to use them.

Most clients don’t need optimization

I once gave a nutrition talk and the questions were all along the lines of, “How many acai berries should I eat in a day?”

My answer? “The acai berries aren’t going to make a difference if you live off coffee for half the day then get takeaways at night.”

I meant that you needed to build a stable foundation before you can think of adding sprinkles on top. For most clients, they aren’t struggling because they have the incorrect amount of acai berries, they’re struggling because their nervous system is in a state of chronic depletion.

You can teach emotional regulation – but not to someone who hasn’t eaten in the last 6 hours.

You can teach distress tolerance – but not to a client surviving on 4 hours of fractured sleep.

You can teach mindful eating – but not to someone whose biological hunger cues are screaming louder than any mindfulness script you could give them.

Most clients think they need more discipline, but it’s not true. They need more capacity. And capacity comes from meeting the body’s non-negotiable needs.

The non-negotiables

For any behaviour change to actually stick, we need one thing first: a regulated body. And regulation isn’t created by hacks, it’s forged by rhythms. Routines. My non-negotiables that build the foundation of everything else are regular eating and the 3 S’s: sleep, stress, and social connection.

Regular meals and snacks are going to support:

• blood sugar stability
• reduced urge to binge because the physical hunger side of it is being met
• more reliable hunger/fullness cues
• more emotional stability (no more getting hangry)
• more resilience and stress tolerance
• increased capacity for doing the deeper therapeutic work

Regular eating isn’t just a nutrition intervention, it’s a lifeline for the nervous system.

Then we have sleep. Our clients can’t do much else if they’re chronically tired. Sleep impacts metabolism, mood, cravings, coping skills, impulse control and goodness knows what else. Sleep is a natural recovery strategy and one we need to prioritize. Simply going to bed at a good hour and not doom-scrolling before trying to sleep works wonders.

Stress can be a bit trickier. We can’t avoid stress. And being chronically stressed can send our clients either towards food as a coping mechanism, or it can disappear their appetite completely and thus provide a whole different set of problems. Therefore, stress management is on the non-negotiable list.

And lastly we have social connection. Humans are social beings. We regulate through relationships so isolation is a stressor (whether we realize it or not). And that stress then drives dysregulated eating. That means that social connection is a kind of medicine.

These aren’t “nice-to-haves”. They are the pre-requisites for healing a disordered relationship with food.

We can’t skip the basics

Our clients often come to us already skipping 10 steps ahead of where they actually are, wanting our opinion on how many grams of protein they need, if they should have apple cider vinegar shots or not, and if they’re intolerant to this or that… And it’s tempting to go along with their enthusiasm, let’s be honest. But they’re often missing the non-negotiable foundational stuff.

Then we wonder:

• why mindfulness doesn’t stick
• why they feel chaotic with food
• why they’re emotionally reactive
• why we can’t pinpoint what food is causing them to bloat
• and why they “just can’t follow the plan”

When we return to the basics – regular eating, sleep, stress management, social connections – everything else becomes easier.

You’re not failing, you’re just missing an effective framework

If you feel like your clients constantly fluctuate between motivated and depleted…
If your sessions feel like you’re putting out fires instead of creating change…
If you’re absolutely exhausted from trying to teach your clients skills they simply don’t have the bandwidth to learn…

Please know that you’re not alone, and you’re not doing anything wrong. You just need a structure that brings clients back to safety and stability before layering extra techniques on top. You need to bring it back to the basics.

If you want some support with this, I have a simple, practical cheat sheet that walks you through the exact steps I use to stabilize clients who are dysregulated and often stuck in a restrict-binge cycle. I call it my Food Freedom Framework and it’s the process that I use every single day to create real change for my clients. Download it here for free.