Doing what I do for a living makes it hard to ignore the plethora of horrendous nutrition advice I hear from people around me or on social media. The hardest truth I try to accept is how my knowledge as a dietitian means nothing to someone with an agenda. When patients seek advice about healthy eating, it often involves something more complicated. Something no meal plan can fix. A negative sense of self makes folks vulnerable to misinformation and unsolicited advice that misses the mark.

I hate the word healthy as it relates to food. As I watch others preach about healthy eating all I see is an obsession with weight loss. While others act with a sense of entitlement, they dramatize and incite fear around what we eat. Most general nutrition advice people share is a culmination of inaccuracies or partial truths. Whenever I ask where they heard that, I hear something like “I don’t know, I heard it somewhere,” or “I saw it on TikTok.”

It behooves you to awaken your inner critic and question what you hear within today’s landscape of advice overload. The most educated choice will be one that’s made after careful examination of both sides of a story. Let’s take carbohydrates. If you’re unwilling to listen to unpopular evidence of why you don’t want to completely avoid carbs, you won’t learn what they can do to benefit your health. But there may be other reasons driving your choice to avoid carbs.

Most folks giving health advice don’t consider behavioral health a vital component of food choices. A patient with an eating disorder avoids calories for fear of weight gain, while another with OCD who loves animals becomes vegan to avoid feeling shame around eating meat. Both have less to do with healthy eating and more to do with a distorted view of themselves. These are serious mental health issues that often lead to severe malnutrition if left untreated. This is where dieting misinformation and unsolicited advice becomes irresponsible and self-serving. You don’t know what you don’t know, so it’s better to keep unresearched opinions to yourself.

The word healthy means different things based on who’s teaching it. For a vitamin supplement company, it’s nutrition supplements. For a dieting company, it’s weight loss. But not everyone needs a supplement or should lose weight. As a dietitian, answering the question, “How can I eat healthier,” is not easy to answer because everyone has their own set of core values tied to their food choices. Telling a patient what they should be eating won’t be as helpful as they would like to believe. The greatest success I have with patients is by not acting like I know best about what they eat.

Unsolicited advice doesn’t help in fact, it can be harmful

It’s natural when we perceive something is wrong, we want to fix it. Let’s say Anne noticed Sally gained weight recently. Anne cares about Sally’s health. She lectures her on how obesity leads to chronic illness and that she should find a way to lose weight. Sally was already aware of her weight and never asked Anne for advice about weight loss. Sally has been meeting with a therapist every week to work on her emotions around eating since her father died. Anne was not aware of that. Even with people who are close to us, we don’t know everything they struggle with.

Lately, it feels like everyone believes they know everything about everyone else’s health. So, it’s hard to explain why well-intentioned diet advice from Aunt Edna at the family picnic is short-sighted. But here goes.

Why I won’t tell others what to eat

People often don’t do what they say they’re going to do. It’s not because they’re lazy or they lack willpower. It’s because they haven’t gotten to the root of the real issue. Often folks believe weight loss will make them feel better about themselves. But what they want is to go back to a time when they were more active, had less responsibility, and felt happier. Even patients as young as eighteen reminisce about an easier time in their life. Growing up is hard.

Food choices often have nothing to do with eating healthy. Eating disorders are complicated mental health issues that often hide in plain sight. Consider a person who loses a lot of weight, and now everyone around them is saying how good they look. Senseless judgment, criticism, and unsolicited advice are detrimental to the person who is suffering. I don’t blame people who don’t know better, I blame our society that stigmatizes mental health and drags its feet in distributing helpful information to folks who need it.

Rigid thinking gets in the way of making lasting lifestyle changes. If there’s a reason not to do something, you’ll always find it. If you’re looking for negativity, you’ll find that too.  The fear of uncertainty that comes with change is often why we talk ourselves into doing nothing. Getting out of your comfort zone is easier said than done, but there’s more power in changing your view of yourself instead of asking me how you should eat. What drives your actions is how you think and what you believe.

When my career was in its infancy, I made a lot of mistakes while stumbling over my personal biases to figure out the best way to help someone. The more I learn the more I realize there’s so much I don’t know. My experience came with paying attention and listening, not lecturing on nutrition facts. Unless a patient is willing to share their story, what I say means nothing. Giving unwanted or the wrong medical nutrition therapy is a useless waste of everyone’s time. Chances are great that many patients sitting in front of me thought I didn’t know what I was talking about. When it came to their personal experience with food, they were right.

DISCLAIMER: The Green Apple Dietitian blog/Substack provides nutrition information for education only and is not intended to offer medical advice or cure any health conditions. The content should NEVER be used as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment of any health condition or problem. Any questions regarding your diet and health should be addressed to your specific healthcare providers. NEVER disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking treatment because of something you have read here.

Green Apple Dietitian makes no warranties expressed or implied regarding the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, comparative or controversial nature, or usefulness of any information posted or shared on this blog/Substack. Green Apple Dietitian does not assume any risk whatsoever for your use of any information contained herein that was posted or shared on this blog/Substack in the past, present, or future. By accessing this blog/Substack, you agree that neither Green Apple Dietitian nor any other affiliated party is to be held liable or otherwise responsible for any decision made, or any action taken or not taken, due to your use of any information presented on this blog/Substack website.