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Sigma Nutrition Radio

#597: Behavioral Psychology in Diet & Health Counselling – David Creel, PhD, RD

Sigma Nutrition Radio

Danny Lennon

Nutrition, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2026

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In clinical practice effective nutrition, exercise, and obesity care is rarely about identifying the single "best" plan on paper. Instead, sustainable change depends on behavioral psychology: understanding the person's context, motivation, barriers, and patterns, then co-designing practical steps that can actually be implemented in real life.

David Creel PhD, RD is a clinical psychologist and registered dietitian working in weight management at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Creel discusses how clinicians can bridge the gap between "optimal recommendations" and what is most likely to create actual behaviour change. This includes a combination of using collaborative communication, self-monitoring, skill-building, relapse prevention planning, and a multidisciplinary framework.

Behavioral and psychological factors shape food choices, physical activity, and adherence far more than knowing the newest guideline. In addition, the modern obesity treatment landscape (including GLP-1 receptor agonists) increases the need for structured behavior-change support: people may experience new hope and new fear (especially fear of weight regain), and the key clinical question becomes how to use these tools to build durable habits and reduce relapse risk over the long term.

Timestamps

  • [03:09] Start of interview
  • [05:31] Challenges in nutrition and exercise recommendations
  • [11:01] Behavior change in real-world practice
  • [16:32] Self-monitoring and its importance
  • [23:48] Non-scale victories and positive body image
  • [25:58] Focusing on body capabilities over aesthetics
  • [27:20] Integrating activity into lifestyle
  • [30:30] Exercise snacking and practical tips
  • [33:36] Impact of GLP-1 receptor agonists
  • [38:24] Addressing fear of weight regain
  • [41:24] Effective multidisciplinary obesity treatment

Related Resources

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 597 of the podcast. My name is Danny Lennon.

0:07.1

You're very welcome to the show. Today we're going to be talking about various aspects related to

0:12.5

diet or health counseling and coaching and actual working clinical practice and how we can

0:19.1

improve adherence to certain behaviors that would lead to long-term

0:22.8

health, some of the psychology behind behavior change, and some of the pragmatic elements

0:28.4

that go beyond just what we see from literature directly related to nutrition. And so to talk

0:34.3

through this concept, I'm going to be talking with Dr. David Creel, who works in the Department of Endocrinology at the Cleveland Clinic.

0:41.9

There, he provides lifestyle interventions for patients that are living with obesity, as well as patients that have a variety of different eating disorders and a range of patients in between.

0:53.8

He has quite a unique background from a few different disciplines in that he is a licensed

1:00.0

psychologist with a doctorate from Louisiana State University that he completed whilst he

1:04.9

was working at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

1:07.9

He's also an ACSM certified clinical exercise physiologist, and in addition

1:13.3

to that is a registered dietitian. And so combining these aspects to his dietetics background,

1:20.2

his exercise physiology background, and his psychology background, he now works to try and promote

1:26.0

physical activity and general lifestyle behaviors and healthy

1:30.9

eating in a variety of different clinical patients.

1:35.0

He's also published research that has mainly focused on things like promoting physical

1:39.5

activity in different clinical populations.

1:42.9

So we're going to be taking more of a practical look at what goes

1:48.0

on within practice and how Dr. Creel recommends working through these various different types of

1:54.5

interventions and behavior change with patients and clients in practice. And so hopefully that will be

2:00.6

of utility. If you are a

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