Eat Type Live

21/07/2025

I recently had a slight freak out over my weight.

It was just a bit more than I thought it would be. Not even a lot. Just a little bit. And I still freaked out.

Yes it IS embarrassing to admit it that it bothered me. As a disordered eating dietitian I feel a certain pressure to be 'above' things like this, you know?

But I also survived growing up in the 90s and early 2000s… Do you even remember how bad diet culture was at that time?

I watched Tyra Banks shaming supposedly plus-size models because they didn’t look heroin-addict-thin. My friends at high school would drink water before eating to fill their stomachs up so they wouldn’t eat as much. Every movie and TV show had a fat kid that was made fun of for always eating.

And I went down a dark path at 18 years old and came very close to anorexia myself…

Maybe diet culture seeped into my very DNA when I was developing or something, because when I weighed myself those diet culture thoughts I thought I had buried came right back up like bad sushi.

And I’m grateful they did.

Let me say that again: I’m grateful they did.

Because it made me stop and take stock of where I’m at. And it gave me a chance to practice the things I tell my clients to do every day. (And reminded me why I won’t be opting to weigh myself again).

Because I’m not an 18-year-old America’s Next Top Model fan anymore. I actually have the tools I need to understand why I gained weight, deal with the mental side of it, and get my body back to its happy place WITHOUT going on a diet.

If you want to know the 7 things I did when I gained weight, I’ve laid it all out in today’s blog post.

Weight gain can be triggering when you're healing your relationship with food - here are 7 practical tips from a disordered eating dietitian

15/07/2025

The teens who caught Tourette's...

During lock downs, a strange illness spread through TikTok. Repeating words, odd facial movements, involuntary jerking of the arms and legs…

It wasn’t true Tourette’s Syndrome; it was the “TikTok tics” and it spread right through the phone screen to infect mainly vulnerable teenage girls.

It was a case of social contagion, where real symptoms developed in response to repeated exposure to videos where people were displaying tics.

Just like you yawn when someone next to you does, these teen girls started to involuntarily mimic the videos they were watching.

Social contagion has been responsible for cases of functional tics like this one, mass fainting, suicides… and, of course, disordered eating.

But how can we stop disordered eating spreading through friend groups and sports clubs, how do we combat toxic social media influences, and how on earth can we help our clients to resist an involuntary mechanism in their mind that is pushing them to mimic disordered behaviours?!

Today’s blog post jumps right in.

From tics to fainting, strange behaviours can spread through social contagion. Eating disorders are not exempt. How can we combat the spread?

10/07/2025

My stomach seemed to inflate the second I put my knife and fork down.

My very skin felt like fat was being injected underneath it, making everything squishier than normal.

My logical mind knew that I couldn’t gain weight so fast... but that was overshadowed but the panic that was taking hold of me.

I needed to get rid of this food right now. I shouldn’t have eaten so much!

This kind of overwhelming panic is what drives your clients to purge, to restrict harder tomorrow, and to get stuck in a restrict-binge cycle that lasts years, even decades...

And a lot of the time, it’s not that they’ve even binged. They’ve simply eaten until fullness. But they haven’t let themselves feel full in such a long time it's become a foreign feeling.

It doesn't feel safe at all. In fact, it can feel unbearable.

So how do you help your clients get through the discomfort without panicking? How do you teach them to tolerate feeling full?

Today’s blog post dives into the practical strategies my clients find most successful.

If your clients have been restricting for a long time, fullness can feel foreign and trigger panic. How can you help them get through it without spiraling?

01/07/2025

I was starting to think I'm a failure because I’ve hit 35 years old and I’m not a millionaire... That’s how much the algorithm was getting to me.

It started with following a few accounts for online entrepreneurs, and some nutrition accounts in the food freedom space, but in the space of half an hour I had been sucked into the comparison game.

Everyone else seemed to be doing it better than me, reaching more people than me, making more money than me...

Thankfully, I was forced off the app to have a call with one of the amazing students in my online course Disordered Eating Coaching Academy. And I realized that I may not be a millionaire, but I was helping this colleague to find her passion and run her business with purpose and a streamlined process - and I’m good at it, too.

Social media can warp our perspective so much that our self-worth takes a hit.

In fact, it’s exactly what the algorithm is designed to do.

In today’s blog post, I’m diving into why the algorithm pushes the wrong content at you, and what you can do to reclaim your life without quitting social media entirely.

Social media use and disordered eating patterns often go hand in hand. Why is that, and what can we do about it?

16/06/2025

When someone tells you they’ve lost weight, what is your initial reaction?

If it’s “Congratulations”, you’re not alone. Society has drummed into us that weight loss is something to strive for, and we praise those who achieve it.

But we shouldn’t.

Because we might actually be love-bombing someone who is engaging in disordered eating behaviours…

Or telling someone they look great when they’re grieving, or suffering an illness…

And reinforcing the idea that your worth is related to your weight…

Today’s blog post is an oldie but a goodie: Stop Praising Weight Loss

Breaking the habit starts with awareness, so be sure to have a quick read if this blog post from the vault.

P.S. This applies to yourself as well. I’m sure all of us are guilty of saying things like, “Well at least I lost some weight!” after having a stomach bug, etc.!

Weight loss is a hard thing to achieve. Period. So when you see someone who’s transformed their body I understand there’s a pull there to say, “Wow, you look great, that’s amazing that you’ve lost 10 kilos!” But I think we’re dangerously missing the mark by praising weight loss. I pers...

10/06/2025

My burger disappeared down my gullet in under a minute, I drained my drink, and then my legs started tapping up and down. I felt compelled to get up quickly and start ticking off more of my never-ending To-Do List, even though I knew I should be enjoying this time with my kids...

This was a classic sign that my nervous system had shifted into more of a fight-or-flight state, and I was having trouble calming down.

I needed to shift from the sympathetic nervous system into more of the parasympathetic. I needed to activate rest-and-digest mode.

Today’s blog post is all about why nervous system regulation matters so much, and what practical steps you can take with your clients (and yourself) to calm down their system.

Because the fact is, most health professionals are introducing nutrition interventions to an already stressed body - and that’s why they don’t stick.

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

02/06/2025

Is coffee the real cause of your anxiety???

It’s a pet peeve of mine the way people say, “My Anxiety”. Like it’s part of who they are. Something they have no control over. This language makes it part of their identity...

But for my clients, their “anxiety” could go by another name completely: a dysregulated nervous system…

I’ve managed to cure my clients’ “anxiety” time and time again with simple fixes and I’m outlining them all for you in today’s blog post.

This is powerful. And it’s not hard to do! No money and very little time required…

Why your morning coffee might be to blame for your anxiety symptoms, and how a simple language shift can change everything.

27/05/2025

I was pacing back and forth, in the dead of night, whilst my baby slept soundly in bed. Up and down the lounge I walked, eyes glued to my pedometer.

I had to get 10,000 steps. It didn’t matter that it was nearing midnight and I had an infant who had never slept through the night, and that it was something of a miracle that he was even sleeping right now.

I had to email through my steps to work tomorrow, as part of the annual walking challenge, and what would they think if I hadn’t done 10,000 steps? I was the dietitian, I was part of the Healthy Lifestyles team for goodness sake. I would be exposed as a fraud…

It was at that exact moment that something clicked inside my head.

This. Was. Stupid.

This health tracker was not healthy for me in any way, shape or form. I should be asleep right now.

I’m sure you can see why I usually have a bit of a hate-hate relationship with health trackers…

But I thought maybe a trial of a continuous glucose monitor would be a fun experiment? It was like 6 years after the pedometer thing, so surely I wouldn’t go down that obsessive route again. I was so much older and wiser.

Or was I?

Jump on over to the blog to find out what happened!

Dietitian Lucy Carey explains why continuous glucose monitors and other health trackers may not be the God-send they are made out to be

19/05/2025

💔 My 7-year-old broke my heart a month or so ago.

You see, I’m a huge Harry Potter nerd. Not of the movies, but the books. I won the first book in a contest aged 10 years old, and I grew up with Harry.

When I first got pregnant, I started reading the Harry Potter books aloud to my growing belly. So you better believe I’ve been waiting 7 long years for my son to be old enough to want me to read the first book to him.

Well, he had other plans. He skipped straight to Book 3. He read it to himself. And he was two chapters away from the end when he stopped because, “There are no funny bits left now”.

It was like taking a battering ram to my slightly-OCD Harry Potter-obsessed mind 😝

And it also reminded me of a blog post I wrote years ago. I had got into it with this guy who thought that novels were “trash” and the only way to expand your mind was to read serious non-fiction titles.

Au contraire! Novels increase IQ and EQ. And I’ll prove it.

Recently I was told that I’ll never “develop as a person” if I continue to read novels instead of more serious non-fiction titles. It’s hard to explain my reaction when confronted with this view: a mix of exasperation, incredulity and facepalming. But sadly, this is a common misperception am...

28/04/2025

"I’ve tried intuitive eating but it doesn’t work for me. I need a meal plan I can stick to instead.”

“If I listened to my body I’d eat cake for every meal!”

“I think portion control is the issue for me. I need to know exactly how much I should be having.”

Sound familiar?

So many of our nutrition clients think intuitive eating doesn’t work… because they’re still stuck in a mindset of control and restriction around food, and they’re terrified that listening to their body will mean gaining weight.

But the real issue isn’t that intuitive eating doesn’t work, its that they’ve skipped a bunch of steps!

I used to think you could teach intuitive eating… but in over a decade of work, I’ve discovered that intuitive eating isn’t something to teach. It’s the natural end result of healing your relationship with food.

So what are the steps you need to take your clients through so that intuitive eating can emerge naturally?

I’m walking through my unique method to guide clients from disordered eating to intuitive eating in my upcoming FREE Masterclass!

And today’s blog post goes into some of the background of why these steps are necessary! Visit EatTypeLive.com/blog for that one!

It’s a quick read that you’ll love if you’ve ever gotten frustrated or felt lost when your clients tell you that intuitive eating doesn’t work for them.

Remember, I’ve made ALL the mistakes so you don’t have to haha! I hope you can join me on the Masterclass.
https://eattypelive.com/op/masterclass/

Free online masterclass from an expert dietitian: the roadmap from disordered eating to intuitive eating (and where weight loss fits in).

14/04/2025

I love challenging the way I look at things. And I love helping my clients to change their own mindsets around food, dieting and their bodies.

But there’s a time and place.

When my clients are in the dark depths of disordered eating, there’s something they need way more than any inspirational Instagram quotes or podcasts on their mindset around food…

They need the most unsexy advice ever: eat regularly.

Because regular meals and snacks are literally the fuel their brain needs to do the deeper healing work.

Today’s blog post goes into more detail about why regular eating is the cornerstone of treatment for disordered eating, and the surprising effects of not eating enough on mental clarity, emotional regulation and body image…

Plus, I have a new freebie for you that is the exact system I use to guide my clients from disordered eating to intuitive eating - in cheat sheet form!

The Food Freedom Framework is the ultimate guide for your consults, and there’s no surprises that regular eating is one of the very first steps! It's all over on the blog!

Forget the inspirational Instagram quotes, the practical first step to healing your relationship with food is actually regular eating.

20/02/2025

🚨 Health coaches, nutritionists, dietitians

If you want to confidently guide your clients away from disordered eating patterns like restricting, bingeing and yoyo dieting...

And into intuitive eating...

This framework is for you.

If your clients have ever said that intuitive eating doesn't work for them, if they've reverted back to dieting, and you've gotten frustrated and started second-guessing your approach, I made this for you!

Intuitive eating doesn't come intuitively if the proper foundations haven't been laid. This framework takes you through each of them.

Intuitive eating isn't the process, it's the natural end result is truly healing their relationship with food.

👋 I'm Lucy, a disordered eating dietitian who spent 10 years perfecting this method.

And I'm giving you the cheat sheet for free 😮

🙏 DM me ROADMAP and it's all yours 🙌