Why I keep telling my clients to eat more, not less

‘Eat less, move more’

The weight loss industry’s mantra since as long as I can remember. Neat, catchy and seems to make sense. We’re eating too much and moving too little, they say, that’s why our waistlines keep expanding.

There is truth to this statement. Whether we gain or lose weight comes down to the law of thermodynamics. If we consume more energy than we expend, we will store the excess, and vice versa. However, chanting ‘eat less, move more’ like some Happy Meal Jillian Michaels toy (she also says, ‘I don’t care if your lungs give out or your legs fall off!’ when you press her six pack!), hasn’t worked to be good advice for very many people.

That’s not to say that no one has ever found it helpful.

Some people seem to wake up one day, realise they probably don’t need to be eating as much as they currently are, buy a FitBit and never look back.

If that’s you, then I’m glad that ‘eat less, move more’ worked out for you.

However, what I come across time and time again are people who’ve probably first learnt that phrase around the same time that they were learning the colours of the rainbow. ‘Eat less, move more’ is an undeniable observation of nature, just like ROY-G-BIV.

As literal children, many of us were taught that gaining weight or becoming fat is a type of moral failure. It means you have fallen victim to your impulsive lack of self-control, greed and gluttony. It’s no coincidence that we have weaponised the ‘seven deadly sins’ and the ‘fruits of the spirit’ against fat bodies. Implying that those who are less sinful would not be walking around with such clear evidence of hedonism and indulgence.

If we can convince children that fat bodies are not just less healthy or less attractive, but morally impure, that is what generates a society-wide obsession with weight loss and achieving or retaining thinness.

For many of the clients I work with, the message of ‘eat less, move more’ has been internalised as ‘I must eat as little as I can get away with, and sweat my arse off whenever I can, to prove that I’m a worthy member of society’.

The ‘power mums’ who I’d see at 6 am on the treadmill at the gym every day, running at 15 kph for half an hour fuelled by black coffee and 4 hours of sleep, who’d go back home to pack 3 school lunches, remind their husband that he has a dentist appointment, and then flawlessly blow dry their hair ready for a 10 hour work day.

The woman at the office begging someone to put that birthday cake away because it’s ‘too tempting’ to have out there, before loudly announcing she’ll just ‘have a sliver’ and then go on about how she’ll push extra hard in Pilates later on.

The construction guy that decides to stop getting pies for lunch, but he doesn’t know what else to get, so he just skips lunch completely - thinking it’ll do him good anyway.

The problem with ‘eat less, move more’ is that it gets so oversimplified that, in many instances, people might think that it’s better to not eat.

People reduce nutrition to food quantity rather than food quality.

And it reinforces the unhelpful narrative of,

‘Being thin is the most important thing you can be.’

Ironically, ‘eat less move more’ often backfires in this area.

I work with clients who have gained weight, likely because they refuse to eat anything more than a rice cake with cottage cheese before 12 pm.

Clients who insist they’re eating 1200 calories per day, or less, yet are not losing weight.

This breaks my heart, as somebody who quite regularly eats 1200 calories before 12 pm on an average weekday.

The body will adapt to how you fuel it.

When we are always trying to eat less and less and less… Our bodies will learn to function on less and less as well.

It is possible that if you have spent an extended period of time eating very little, your body has learnt to survive on very little, which puts you in a position that is very susceptible to weight gain. This is a process called adaptive thermogenesis, where your body aims to conserve energy output from various processes.

The good news is that you can effectively reverse adaptive thermogenesis by eating more. But this means that a person would need to take deliberate time off from trying to lose weight. It also means that person may experience some initial weight gain. Unfortunately, this feels too threatening for so many people that they remain unwilling to commit to doing it, even though it puts them in a much better position to pursue weight loss in the future.

Not everybody who is struggling to lose weight is dealing with adaptive thermogenesis. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not often still under-eating.

I work with many clients who skip meals or eat minuscule portions and complain about the struggle they’ve been having to lose weight. As it turns out, they might be eating more than they realise at other times during the week. Grazing on tidbits across the day, sneaking an extra post-dinner portion, letting themselves off the hook for takeaway night or when they’re out for dinner.

None of these are bad habits, by the way, but they’re often unconscious habits that we’re probably only doing because we’re not eating enough for our actual meals.

When we start properly fuelling ourselves with meals that are balanced in macronutrients and centred around minimally processed foods, we are likely to experience much greater satiety than trying to rely on these measly, 200-calorie excuses for a meal.

It’s funny, because it’s like when people start actually eating a proper breakfast and lunch (I’m talking >400 calories per meal here), suddenly they don’t struggle with ‘sugar addiction’ and ‘no self-control after dinner’ anymore. Like maybe, just maybe, a single boiled egg and a carrot might not be enough for lunch after all.

Some research has shown that people who show less dietary restraint (as in ‘strictness’ about the type and quantity of food that they eat) often have a lower BMI than those who exhibit higher dietary restraint. Read that again. People who deprive themselves and constantly try to manipulate their food intake often end up heavier than those who don’t. (I don’t mean to suggest that this is the only cause of weight gain, nor am I implying that people in larger bodies are doing something wrong; I’m just pointing out one potential correlation).

My thinness is not an outcome of some super high level of self-control and will-power, and most of the ‘naturally thin’ people you know probably aren’t trying particularly hard to stay that way either.

I’ve talked a lot about weight loss in this article, and how ‘eat less, move more’ can sometimes backfire in that regard.

Though I don’t agree with making weight loss the sole focus of somebody’s health journey, I’m empathetic to the pressure that we face in society to be of a certain size and shape, which, frankly, can make getting by a lot easier. I’d rather help somebody lose weight and feel a bit better about their body in a way that isn’t so depressingly restrictive than see that person run off to the open arms of a predatory fat-loss coach who probably hates them and wants to make their life miserable.

However, I’d like to circle back to the point that I was making earlier, that perhaps if we didn’t make it seem like our weight represented some kind of moral failure, we wouldn’t attach so much guilt and shame to the action of eating - something that we must do every day to survive.

If we begin to recognise the importance of food itself, as opposed to the absence of it, for our health, maybe we can start to appreciate the benefits that come from fuelling our bodies, our cells, our gut microbes and our soul (because how else can you describe sharing a delicious meal with loved ones, or eating the best chocolate cake you’ve ever had?).

I propose that, for many of us, in 2026, we should be aiming to eat more.

To nourish our bodies & live a well-fuelled life.

Who’s with me?

Lx