Claire St John, MPH RD Cedrd-s

02/09/2026

"I graduated, I completed my internship (in a hospital, telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables, in so many words), passed my exam and became a Registered Dietitian, ready to enter the job market and spread my message far and wide.

The two job offers I got were: 1. Working in an inpatient eating disorder center or 2. Working at a home for Veterans.

I was agnostic. I didn’t know anything about people with eating disorders, and I didn’t know anything about veterans, and I was just going to tell them all to eat more fruits and vegetables anyway.

I took the eating disorder job, and friends, what a wild ride it has been."

It was selfish, to be honest.

02/04/2026

I think, as eating disorder treatment providers, it's easy to lose site of a client's autonomy. No one wants or likes to admit that it happens, but it does.

When a mental health diagnosis can present as egosyntonic, or lead to distorted thoughts about food and body, it's hard. Hard on the individual living with the disorder, and hard on the treatment team. We aim to provide structure, grounding, education, boundaries, and a reality check—all while holding space for empowerment and agency. Because healing and recovery require all of these things.

Sometimes, a member of your treatment team will get it wrong. However you are able to have that conversation when it occurs, please remember you do not need to apologize for your self-advocacy.

01/30/2026

Restriction seems to be the default answer to everything, when in reality it rarely helps and has a lot of potential to be harmful.

Our bodies are complex and they have complex needs. Often, cravings are attributed to some sort of moral failing, and the proposed solution is denial or avoidance. But bodies don’t actually function that way. A lot of times, feeling “addicted” to sugar is a sign that your body needs more of something to address its energy needs, not less of something.

So please don’t “break up” with a food, unless you’re allergic to it, or making a religious or ethically driven decision in accordance with your values. Food is good, and sugar serves a purpose. It’s also just darn delicious.

Have questions about sugar and food cravings? I’d love to answer them. Save this post, share it, and reach out to book a session today.

01/27/2026

I wrote this at the end of 2024, and since then, things have gotten a lot harder for a lot of people. Fewer people have access to the comforts I talk about, and many people are living in constant fear of what might happen to them or what might happen next. But I still think looking toward what is good is what will save us. We don’t have to close our eyes to what is bad, and we should always fight for more good for everyone, but embracing the good that we have access to still feels radically important to me.

*I wrote this at the end of 2024, and since then, things have gotten a lot harder for a lot of people. Fewer people have access to the comforts I talk about, and many people are living in constant fear of what might happ...

01/23/2026

I took a job at an eating disorder clinic because it was one of two offers I got, not because I had any particular interest in or knowledge about eating disorders. But working there changed everything I thought I knew about nutrition.

Watching patients reconnect with food, seeing their fear dissolve as they ate things they'd been avoiding for years, learning that satisfaction was the goal and not something to be managed or controlled—it shifted my entire framework.

I don't think I would have learned this if I'd taken the other job. Sometimes the thing you need to learn finds you before you even know you're looking for it.

01/20/2026

When your brain is consumed with hunger, you don't have the capacity to advocate for yourself. You just survive. People don't stay in harmful situations because they're weak or stupid. They stay because they've been systematically depleted of the resources they'd need to leave.

Feeding yourself adequately isn't just about physical health. It's about reclaiming the mental clarity to recognize when something is hurting you and having enough strength left to do something about it.

01/15/2026

No one needs another lecture about "healthy" eating. They need someone to tell them it's okay to be fed.

01/09/2026

Get mad. And then take that anger and channel it into healing.

01/07/2026

I went through an entire dietetics program without realizing I wasn't eating enough myself, so there are no apologies due to me. Or to anyone who was told their whole life that they can always eat less, that they shouldn't need so much, or that their body should look different than it does.

No one says that to a tree. Or a mountain. Why do we have to look different? Why can't we eat to true satisfaction? Our fixation on food and body size is strange. There are so many other things to think about, and eating enough actually allows us to do that.

12/31/2025

I know not everyone has equal access to food, and that's exactly why those of us who do shouldn't waste it on voluntary restriction.

The diet industry has spent decades convincing us that January means deprivation, that a new year requires shrinking ourselves, that self-improvement starts with saying no to what we want. But deprivation isn't a value system. It's not making you better or more disciplined, it's just stealing your attention from everything else you could be doing with this short, strange life.

If you're going to fight for anything this year, fight for your own access to pleasure—and for everyone else's right to it too.

12/27/2025

This question came from my brother during the worst of COVID lockdown, and it completely shifted how I move through uncertainty.

Anxiety lives almost entirely in the future, in the terrible things that could happen, the losses we might face, the worst-case scenarios we're trying to prevent. But your body is here, right now. And when you bring your attention back to this exact moment, you often find that your immediate needs are met. You're breathing. You're safe in this minute. The catastrophe you're bracing for hasn't actually arrived yet.

That doesn't erase real threats or make hard things disappear, but it does mean you get to stop suffering twice—once in anticipation and once if it actually happens. Your nervous system can't tell the difference between an imagined future crisis and a present one, so when you ask yourself "how am I right now?" you're giving it permission to register the safety that actually exists in this moment.

12/19/2025

Science and magic and the truth about trans fats! I’m wrapping up my series, “fat is my favorite macronutrient”, by shedding light on the difference between partially hydrogenated fats and hydrogenated fats, and where we stand with both now in the United States.

If you stuck around for the whole series, what was most helpful? Did you learn anything you hadn’t known before? Let me know in the comments, and I’d love to hear which marco people want to hear about next!