If you’ve been feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or like food is running the show—I see you. That’s exactly why I created the Empowered Eating Experience. This post is part of our series on how to rebuild trust with your body, so you can eat in a way that feels nourishing, satisfying, and freeing. We’re showing you how to unlearn the food rules that kept you stuck—and replace them with real strategies that work for the long haul. Let’s do this together!

Ask Keri: Should I feel like a fraud if I’m a wellness expert and still encounter emotional eating?

Keri Says: It may sound like a cliche, but let’s start with a serious truth: Nobody’s perfect.

In fact, when it comes to food, being “perfect” is often a bad thing. It’s not healthy to be super regimented, and when you approach eating in that way, it often leads to failure, stress spikes, and mental exhaustion.

People think, “OMG I ate a box of cookies! How can I be a health coach or an RD or a yoga teacher if I can’t follow my own advice?” But if you weren’t imperfect, you wouldn’t be a human, you’d be a computer. And look, everyone’s already got WebMD; they come to you for health advice because you are a living, breathing person who can relate.

Think of it this way: Would you want to see a therapist who never has moods? Who has never felt sad or confused?

Or, consider what a “healthy relationship” with another individual looks like. I bet your best friend in the entire world sometimes annoys you. You probably get into disagreements and have to deal with them and then patch things up. That doesn’t mean it’s not a strong, healthy friendship. Similarly, you might know all about how to handle emotional eating, whether it’s tapping into your cravings or journaling. That doesn’t mean all of that won’t occasionally get thrown out the window when life gets complicated. Perfect relationships with people don’t exist, so it’s unrealistic to expect you’d have a perfect relationship with food. I always tell clients to aim for a “really good” relationship, and that applies if you’re a wellness expert, too.

The key is understanding your own imperfections and how bouts of emotional eating fit into an overall healthy life, which is going to include disruptions, ups and downs, and unsteadiness whoever you are.

Understanding imperfections is part of building a healthy, empowered relationship with food. Enroll now in the Empowered Eating Experience!

How to do that?

The first step is to acknowledge that ups and downs should happen and are going to happen. That takes the pressure off when you do “mess up”, so that you can just recognize you fell off rather than immediately going into a “I’m the worst nutritionist ever!” downward spiral. That doesn’t mean you won’t feel bad or can’t give yourself the space to feel bad about it. It’s just about experiencing feeling bad and then getting back on track.

Next, try to look at your own situation the way you’d approach a client’s challenges. Am I doing this too often? Where is this coming from? Sometimes you’ll be able to evaluate your own behavior honestly; other times you’ll need help. I used to ask one of the dietitians who worked in my practice, Lara Metz, to occasionally be my “RD for the week, please!”

There are times when you want to be accountable to be somebody or when it just helps to share your thoughts.

In the end, remember that you can fall off track and it’s not really falling off. In the Empowered Eating Experience, we embrace imperfection as part of the process.

If you’re ready to shift your relationship with food from all-or-nothing to empowered and sustainable, I’d love for you to learn more about the Empowered Eating Experience. It’s where you will learn the strategies that help you feel calm, confident, and clear around food—for life.

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