When \"Expert\" Nutrition Advice Is Making Your Food Addiction Worse

If you’ve been trying to recover from food addiction, binge eating, or emotional eating and still feel stuck in cravings, relapse, and food obsession, you might think something is wrong with you, but what if the real problem isn’t you at all? What if the real problem is the nutrition advice you’ve been following?

Recently, I saw a post that summed this up perfectly. It said:

“Imagine thinking nutrition is only valid if it comes from the same system that created ultra-processed food, chronic disease, and lifelong prescriptions. Hard pass.”

Then it shared an example of a nutritionist telling people to eat fast-food fries because they contain fiber.

That right there is one of the reasons why so many people struggling with food addiction feel confused, defeated, and hopeless. They’re being told that addictive, inflammatory, ultra-processed food is part of “health.”

For someone with an addicted brain, that message is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.

A major player in our food addiction recovery is eating real, whole foods that are nutrient dense, not too starchy or hyperpalatable. The goal isn’t to follow a diet label but to eat foods that serve us well. Anything that makes us crave, disrupts our blood sugar or that we feel emotionally attached to probably should be avoided no matter what the experts say about said foods.

Nutrition Is Not Neutral in Food Addiction

If you struggle with binge eating, sugar addiction, compulsive eating, or emotional eating, food is not just food for you.

Food is chemistry. Certain foods trigger dopamine, serotonin, and reward pathways in your brain and they light up the same areas that drugs and alcohol do. Sugar, refined carbohydrates, and ultra-processed foods don’t just taste good, they hijack your brain to want to keep eating.

They create:

• Cravings

• Obsession

• Loss of control

• Emotional volatility

• Relapse

So when someone tells you, “All foods fits,” or “There are no bad foods,” or “Just eat in moderation,” they are ignoring how addiction actually works.

You don’t relapse because you’re weak, you relapse because you’re eating things that chemically push you back into addiction.

Why So Many People Fail in Recovery

One of the biggest stumbling blocks I see in my coaching practice is this: People are trying to recover from food addiction while following nutrition advice designed for people who don’t have a food addiction..

Flexible eating, intuitive eating, moderation, no restrictions and honor every craving….That advice might be fine for someone who can eat a cookie and move on with their life, but for someone whose brain is wired for addiction, it keeps the door open to bingeing, food noise, and relapse. You cannot heal an addicted brain while feeding it addictive substances.

Credentials Don’t Matter If the Results Are Bad

There’s a powerful question that came out of that viral post:

Who would you trust more….a credentialed expert repeating advice that isn’t working or someone who is actually helping people reverse symptoms, improve labs, lose weight, and feel normal around food again?

I’m not anti-science and I’m not anti-education.…I am pro-results.

The results are clear: Ultra-processed foods, seed oils, refined carbs, and sugar are driving obesity, diabetes, inflammation, binge eating, and food/sugar addiction. You don’t fix that by justifying junk food because it contains fiber.

You fix it by removing the foods that are breaking your brain and replacing them with real food that supports healing.

Why Real Food Makes Food Sobriety Easier

When my clients shift to real, whole, low-carb, nutrient-dense food, something powerful happens. Cravings quiet down, food obsession fades, blood sugar stabilizes, emotions become easier to manage and decision-making improves. That doesn’t happen because they suddenly have developed willpower, it happens because there is power in real nutrient dense food.

When your brain isn’t being constantly hijacked by sugar and ultra-processed carbs, you finally have the capacity to do the emotional and behavioral work of recovery.

If you’ve been stuck in cycles of dieting, “falling off plan,” bingeing, and starting over, you don’t need another mainstream nutrition plan, you need a food sobriety framework that respects how your brain actually works. You don’t need permission to eat addictive food, you need the support, structure and a roadmap to stop letting food run your life.

Food freedom is not found in moderation, It’s found in removing what hurts you and building a way of eating that supports your recovery and goals and that is possible no matter how many times you’ve failed before.