As someone who has been a dietitian in various settings for the past 15+ years (!!!), I’m used to a lot of confusion about what we do. As an inpatient dietitian, I dealt with complaints about hospital food every day – I promise I wasn’t the one salting your mash! As an outpatient dietitian, I realized that people often expect us to be a living, breathing My Fitness Pal, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the nutritional facts of every food and someone who could easily create a personalized meal plan in minutes. Even today, as a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders and someone who is quite vocal about non-weight and non-dieting approaches, people in the know still ask for weight loss advice!
Just kidding, but I get it! It’s nearly impossible to summarize the nuanced and individualized work that goes into nutritional counseling without dieting, and the weight-centered paradigm is so normalized in our culture that it’s supposed to be how a dietitian practices. It’s one of the first reasons why when onboarding a new client, I provide an FAQ sheet and an outline of what nutritional counseling is like and a brief overview at their first appointment. It is important to me as a provider that my clients feel comfortable and have a sense of what to expect in our work together.
It takes a lot of courage and vulnerability to trust someone with something as personal as your relationship with food and your body. This is especially true if you’ve had a bad experience working with a dietitian or other health care provider in the past.
I know I feel a lot less nervous about something if I have an idea of what’s going to happen. If you’re curious about working with a non-diet nutritionist but aren’t sure what to expect, read this post to find out what it’s like!
What to expect working with a non-diet dietitian:
Focus on your relationship and eating behaviors/habits – NOT the scale.
Non-dieting dieters know that the BMI scale is BS. While changes in weight can provide us some information that may make weighing a client useful in certain circumstances (for example, during nutritional recovery and weight recovery in eating disorder recovery), we know that it tells us almost nothing about your health, your eating habits, and absolutely nothing nothing about your worth as a person. Your scale distracts you from helping you take practical steps to improve your health and well-being – which is not same with weight loss. Rather than focusing on the scale, a non-diet nutritionist will aim to provide a safe environment for people of all body sizes to work on their individual non-weight related goals.
That said, just because as non-diet nutritionists we don’t focus on weight loss, that doesn’t mean we can’t support you if you want to lose weight. Sometimes people worry that they are not allowed to express their desire for weight loss when working with a non-diet* dietitian. But as I remind my clients, if you didn’t want to lose weight, you’d probably already be a pretty intuitive eater! Almost everyone we work with wants to lose weight at some level, and it’s okay to discuss this with your dietitian. They should be able to help you decompress your desire to lose weight, have a nuanced and personalized discussion about the potential risks/benefits of pursuing weight loss, and help you figure out how you want to proceed.
*Unfortunately, I have seen some dietitians new to the business dismiss clients’ weight concerns, and I know when I was new to the business, I did the same. It’s a learning curve for us moving into a whole new paradigm! If this has happened to you and you have a good relationship with your dietitian, it’s okay to share this with your provider—they should be open to listening and learning from you.
Lots of listening.
You are the expert of your body and your experience. While we have a lot of knowledge and advice, we want to understand each individual customer and their unique needs before we make it available. No one-size-fits-all approach here! Non-dietitian dietitians are typically trained in therapeutic methods such as motivational interviewing, acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness, along with intuitive eating, medical nutrition, and health at every size. We have an extensive toolbox of nutritional, behavioral and therapeutic interventions from which to choose and support you and your unique needs. Different dietitians will have different personalities and approaches, but in general, by meeting a non-diet dietitian, you’ll get a lot more listening and a lot less lecturing—hopefully almost none!
Minimal to no restrictive nutritional support.
Non-diet dietitians work with many different concerns, not just eating disorder rehabilitation. We see many clients with food-related health conditions, including some who may benefit from temporarily or permanently eliminating or reducing certain foods. A non-diet nutritionist will understand that food is only one part of health and will aim to provide nutritional care that is as minimally restrictive as possible. Sometimes dietary restriction is part of truly evidence-based care (think gluten for celiac disease), but we’ll work with you to make it as painless as possible and not add unnecessary restrictions. Plus, we often support customers with food-related health issues by helping them add more food! I love working with clients with IBS who have been told to eliminate a number of different foods, because it’s so much fun to help them eat more and feel better!
An environment that fosters a growth mindset.
Part of the challenging eating mindset is challenging binary thinking and the idea that with food there is right and wrong. We don’t expect you to be a “perfect” intuitive eater after a session or two – or really ever! Human beings make mistakes with food and eat in ways that don’t feel good. This is part of life! We see these instances as learning opportunities, not to mention a general side effect of being a living, breathing human being.
It’s normal to worry about being judged for food choices, especially if you’ve been judged for food choices by family members or other providers. You should feel safe sharing these challenges with your dietitian, who should be able to gain curiosity rather than judgment, help you understand what happened, and learn from it.
Nutrition!
We may be dieters without a diet, but we’re still dieters! Depending on your individual needs, the diet can be emphasized more or less and will probably look different than the type of diet you usually see promoted online – probably a lot less sexy and exciting lol. However, nutritional therapy will still be part of your care, whether it’s simply supporting you to eat enough throughout the day (the most important aspect of good nutrition), or more targeted nutritional support.
If you’re currently working with a “non-diet” dietitian and you’re not getting these things from your work together, it might be time to think about what value you’re getting from your working relationship. Although I love that body positivity and intuitive eating have become more mainstream also means that unfortunately there are more people using the no-diet label who aren’t necessarily experienced or trained, not to mention people using no-diet as marketing rather than a treatment example.
Whether you’re working to heal your relationship with food or trying to figure out how to better take care of your body with a health condition – or both! – Our goal at Rachael Hartley Nutrition is to help you define health on your terms and provide the support you need. Read more about the practice’s philosophy here and get in touch if you’d like to see if we’re a good fit to work with. We work with clients out of our office in Columbia, SC, and in nearly multiple states throughout the US. We are also in network with BCBS so you can get nutrition support as part of your benefits.
