I graduated in 2021 feeling 5 to 10 years ahead of my field

I started using the word “psychonutrition” earlier this year (first couple months of 2026), and it had never occurred to me before then.

I was creating this podcast that I run, Hot Girl Psychology, and I was meditating on my intentions for the podcast. I meditate as much as humanly possible because it is the best way to expose yourself to yourself. It came to me in a meditation, the concept of psychonutrition, because the work that I do is very much within the realm of dietetics, but it stretches to the very maximum what our skills can accomplish.

I remember looking that word up and being like, there’s really not much out there about this. This seems like a great word for what it is that I’m trying to do, because I’ve used things like trauma-informed nutrition and somatic nutrition, but those are two types of psychonutrition.

What psychonutrition holds

There’s multiple types of psychonutrition. There’s attachment nutrition. There’s somatic nutrition, there’s disordered eating nutrition, there’s trauma-informed nutrition, there’s conscious nutrition. There’s skills within psychonutrition like interoception and neuroception and unconditional positive regard. The idea behind all of this work is a blanket term for what does this all encompass, because it’s really rooted in the psychology and the physiology of it all. Food and body are the central components from which we draw all of these different factors.

It’s definitely more novel, but it’s not fully novel.

Where I learned it was coming

When I was in school at University of Washington, I did my dietetic internship there, I did my master’s there, I did part of a PhD there. I did two master’s degrees there. My education felt like it was on the forefront of this being born. It felt progressive, clinically innovative, on the cutting edge of science. I was exposed to some of the best science out there, and at the same time I was learning about PTSD. The Body Keeps the Score was becoming really popular. From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker about complex PTSD was becoming really popular. Trauma physiology very perfectly seemed to overlap so well with disordered eating.

The University of Washington’s nutrition program has some of the best disordered eating care in the country because we have so many different disordered eating centers out in Seattle. As I was going through all of this, learning about trauma physiology, learning about disordered eating care, and also my own healing, I started to put these pieces together and see the overlaps between somatic science, trauma-informed care, attachment theory, the window of tolerance, interoception, neuroception, and mental health. Putting all of those pieces together yielded something that was very clearly where our field was heading, and was not where our field was yet.

When I graduated from my program in 2021, I felt like I was probably 5 to 10 years ahead of where things will be. In my opinion, in five years, everything I’m talking about right now is going to be standard of care. Partially because I’m going to make sure it’s like that, and also because it’s inevitable.

The Reddit post

I honestly felt like an island for the majority of the time that I’ve been doing this work, until one day I was browsing Reddit on their dietetics subreddit and I saw somebody post and say, hey, does anyone do nutritional psychology, or is anybody into somatic nutrition, or this trauma-informed nutrition stuff? I keep hearing about it, I think it’s really cool, I want to learn about it. I was like, oh my god. So I DM’d the person. They were a dietitian. I said, hey, let me interview you. I own a practice that does this work. I want to see if I can bring you on my team. And that person is Abbie Alder, who is the very first employee of New Approach Health. Younger people, newer people in the field are starting to pick up on this work.

From a clinical perspective, the amount of recovery that I see people have, growth in their relationship with food, growth in their relationship with their body, from these psychonutrition principles, those skills have become so good at helping people improve their relationship with food and body that I cannot see a world where this doesn’t end up becoming our future.

Still a scientist

Prior to becoming a dietitian, I was a scientist. I was in a PhD program, knee-deep in the research all the time. I was balls deep in the research, up to my nose in it. I could never have gone into direct client or patient care without doing something on the innovative clinical frontier. I may have dropped out of a PhD program, but at my heart, I’m still a scientist.

Creating the certified psychonutritionist coursework is designed to help not only legitimize what I’m talking about here, but also allow us to get paid more. For so long, dietitians have lamented about how they on average make $75,000 a year. With a master’s degree, you could be lucky if you make $85,000 a year on average in the United States. If we were to standardize a new type of dietitian who has advanced training skills, there is absolutely a case to be made for us to be paid more as we adapt skills that we already have.

We already have cognitive behavioral therapy-informed skills or techniques. We already have dialectical behavioral therapy-informed skills and techniques because those are used to treat disordered eating. We use modified forms of exposure and response therapy-informed skills when people are afraid of trying new foods, or afraid of getting sick from foods. We already do these skills when you work in disordered eating. And they are very, very, very much, like, duh, of course a dietitian does this.

What I tell clinicians

If you come to work at New Approach Health, I teach you all the skills you need to be a certified psychonutritionist and you do it not having to pay for the course outright. You get to work under me and I mentor you through the process, and I pay you for it, because you work directly with patients. If you don’t want to come work for New Approach Health, that’s perfectly fine. You should take the certified psychonutritionist coursework.

This work is going to expose you to yourself, because it is emotional work. Sometimes you have to be there to co-regulate, you have to be there to hold the room together. And sometimes it will reveal to you what you have unhealed. If you want to be effective at your job, you must practice what you preach. To be a clean vessel for this work means to have done the work yourself.

This is not a substitute for actual psychotherapy. It is adjunctive to it. It augments the work that a patient is already doing with their therapist.

Meal plans don’t work in isolation. A person can just get ChatGPT to give it to them. We’re not going to be giving meal plans much longer. That inevitably is going to be replaced by AI. So we have to continue evolving our skills in order to maintain something that absolutely requires a human element. And co-regulation is that. Making contact with another nervous system is exactly that. Maybe someday AI will be able to co-regulate, but right now we’re nowhere near that. Helping a patient how to co-regulate with these trauma-informed skills is by far the best thing that you can do for your patients.