Meet Sarah Grant
Hi, I’m Sarah. I'm the founder of Gut Reaction, a private online nutrition clinic specialising in eating disorders and disordered eating.
For the past thirteen years I've been helping people find their way out of a difficult relationship with food. I’d love to help you too.
PROFESSIONAL OVERVIEW
A BANT Registered Nutritional Therapy and Behaviour Change Practitioner with over thirteen years of clinical experience, I am one of a small number of practitioners in the UK to have completed specialist Advanced Practitioner training in Nutritional Therapy for Eating Disorders.
I support adults experiencing disordered eating and those working on eating disorder recovery. Areas of specialist focus include binge eating disorder, emotional eating, compulsive overeating, orthorexia and the long fallout of chronic dieting. Many clients also seek support for related concerns including digestive symptoms, fatigue, anxiety and low mood.
My approach combines personalised nutritional guidance with evidence-based behaviour change, drawing on Intuitive Eating, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and body image work to support both the physiological and emotional dimensions of disordered eating.
At the heart of my work is a proprietary framework, The 7 Dynamics of a Healthy Relationship with Food and Your Body, developed over a decade of clinical practice and designed to guide meaningful, lasting change across the spectrum of disordered eating.
I take a holistic, weight-inclusive, compassion-led approach, respecting body diversity and helping clients prioritise life-enhancing behaviours free of diet culture and restrictive food rules.
To better understand potential functional and biochemical imbalances, I selectively offer testing to help assess gut function, nutrient status and food sensitivities.
Eating disorder recovery often works best as a team effort so, where needed, I work collaboratively alongside GPs, therapists and other health professionals to ensure clients receive joined-up, safe and effective care.
My specialist focus:
- Preoccupation with food and ‘food noise’
- Binge eating disorder
- Compulsive overeating
- Emotional and stress-related eating
- Orthorexia and health anxiety around food
- Chronic dieting, yo-yo dieting and the restrict-overeat cycle
- Body image distress and body dissatisfaction
- Other disordered eating patterns and OSFED
- Supporting your relationship with food and your body during or after GLP-1 medication
I also provide ‘non-diet’ nutrition support for:
- Gut health, IBS and digestive concerns
- Fatigue, anxiety, low mood and burnout
- Menopause and midlife body changes
PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
Nutritional Therapy for Eating Disorders: Advanced Practitioner Programme
Diploma in Nutritional Therapy (DipNut, mBANT, rCNHC)
Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor (CIEC), trained with The Original Intuitive Eating Pros
Applying Intuitive Eating and Non-Diet Approaches in Practice (London Centre for Intuitive Eating)
Psychological Approaches to Obesity (National Centre for Eating Disorders)
Body Image Healing (Marci RD Nutrition: Food and Body Image Healers Training Institute)
Extensive training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) including ACT for Body Image Concerns, ACT for Self-Esteem and ACT for Mindfulness and Acceptance
Level 2 Counselling Skills
Certified Food & Spirit™ practitioner
Member of the British Association for Applied Nutrition and Nutritional Therapy (mBANT)
Member of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (rCNHC)
Gut Reaction is fully insured for Nutritional Therapy
I invest in regular CPD and clinical supervision, maintaining a particular focus on eating behaviour, body image, gut health and nutritional science. I am fascinated by the complex interconnections between food, the gut and our psycho-emotional wellbeing.
my personal story
I came to this work through my experiences in my own body…
As a child I was labelled a picky eater. The foods I felt comfortable with were very limited which made social eating feel stressful and by my teens and early twenties I was also struggling with persistent and unpredictable digestive symptoms, chronic bloating and a general fogginess that took the edge off daily life.
When a stressful period in my mid-twenties pushed my gut health to a new low, discovering nutritional therapy changed everything. Taking steps to gain a better understanding of what was driving my symptoms, learning how to nourish my body in a more balanced way and addressing what was actually going on rather than managing symptoms, all transformed how I felt in myself.
Feeling inspired to help other people with similar struggles with mine, I decided to re-train and qualified as a nutritional therapy practitioner, and set up Gut Reaction in April 2013.
Whilst the focus of my early practice was supporting IBS and digestive concerns, I was also attracting a lot of people who wanted to lose weight. The more clients I worked with, the more I witnessed the damage that diet culture and the pursuit of weight loss caused - the shame, the exhaustion, the deep sense of personal failure in people who were not failing at all.
Given the extraordinary complexity of factors affecting an individual's body and relationship with food, I quickly realised that promising weight loss was an exceedingly difficult promise to make and something about working in this space felt fundamentally misaligned with my values, and I couldn't ignore it.
I also experienced my own small but instructive lesson when a period of trying low carb eating ended, as restriction so often does, with a rebound that was surprising in its intensity. What had felt natural and health-motivated had tipped into something that my body needed to ‘correct’. That experience gave me a visceral understanding of what restriction does to appetite and eating behaviour, whatever the intention behind it.
Around the same time, I discovered Intuitive Eating - an evidence-based framework that shifts the focus from controlling food to rebuilding trust with it. A game changer personally and professionally, it transformed how I understood my own relationship with food and body, including my familiarity with the orthorexic mindset (something that can develop when health-focussed eating becomes its own kind of preoccupation) - and it transformed both the focus of my work and how I chose to work with others.
"13 years of working with individuals through their most difficult moments around food, alongside my personal experiences, means I carry a deep respect for how unique each person is and helps me meet each client with genuine compassion.”
Sarah Grant, Gut Reaction
Through my time working one-to-one with people struggling with binge eating disorder, emotional eating, compulsive overeating and the long fallout of chronic dieting, I’ve learned that these types of challenges with food are almost never really about the food. It is about what food has come to represent: safety, control, comfort or relief from feelings that need a different response. And it's about a body that has been underfed, overfed, fought with or ignored for so long that its own signals can no longer be trusted.
The type of nutrition support I provide now is all about helping people to reconnect with food in a more trusting and peaceful way so it can find its proper place in their lives. Food is not the everything, not the enemy, not the solution to feelings that deserve something better. It is just food - nourishing, ordinary, enjoyable food.
I feel really proud of the work I do here at Gut Reaction and hope I can help you too.