Introduction
Living with a disability can bring unique challenges around food: preparing meals, understanding what nutrition you need, listening to hunger/fullness cues, managing emotional eating, and navigating diet culture. If you’re also recovering from an eating disorder or seeking food freedom, these challenges can feel especially heavy.
At Relinquish on the Gold Coast, we provide compassionate, inclusive nutrition care that honours your experience, your body, your goals not just external expectations or weight targets. Whether your plan is self-managed, plan-managed or NDIA-managed, nutrition support can be part of your NDIS journey in meaningful, healing ways.
In this post, you’ll learn what NDIS can fund, how nutrition support helps with eating disorder recovery, practical ways we work with participants, and how you can begin the process of accessing and benefiting from this support.
What Nutrition Support Can Be Funded by the NDIS
When someone’s disability affects how they eat, prepare food, or what nutrition they require, the NDIS can provide funding to help with that support.
Here are some of the ways nutrition supports may be included:
- One-on-one consultations with a qualified dietitian to assess nutritional needs, eating patterns, health history, barriers, and goals.
- Development of tailored meal plans, adapted to your preferences, health needs, emotional relationship with food, and lifestyle.
- Assistance with meal planning, grocery shopping, budgeting, and food preparation skills (either directly or with support workers).
- Support to build independence: helping you develop confidence in cooking, choosing foods, timing of meals, managing social eating, and understanding hunger / fullness.
- Help with food safety, nutritional adequacy, special needs (e.g. medical conditions, swallowing difficulties, feeding supports).
- Where relevant, training and support for carers or support workers to better assist you safely with your nutrition goals.
Importantly: the NDIS generally does not fund supports just because of weight loss or cosmetic dieting goals. But it can fund supports that help you improve your wellbeing, independence, health, and quality of life when your nutrition needs are affected by your disability.
How Nutrition Support Helps in Eating Disorder Recovery
When you combine nutrition support with eating disorder recovery, the benefits can be profound. Here are the key ways it helps:
- Reducing Shame & Guilt Around Food
- A non-judgemental, respectful nutrition approach helps you move away from guilt or moral judgement about food.
- You can rebuild a healthy, peaceful relationship with food, based on nourishment, satisfaction, and trust — not restriction, fear or control.
- Relearning Hunger & Fullness Cues
- Many people who experience eating disorders become disconnected from their body cues. A skilled dietitian can guide you to re-tune your awareness of hunger, fullness, timing, and satisfaction.
- This supports more intuitive and sustainable eating, which also improves mental and physical wellbeing.
- Developing Practical Skills
- Meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, understanding food labels, portioning, budgeting — when taught and supported, these skills can increase your confidence and independence.
- Social eating, special occasions, dealing with internal pressures or diet talk can also be discussed and strategised.
- Collaboration with Your Support Team
- Working alongside psychologists, medical professionals, support workers, family, and NDIS coordinators means your nutrition care complements your broader recovery and wellbeing goals.
- Holistic support reduces risk of relapse, helps with emotion regulation, food-related anxiety, and supports sustainable progress.
- Tailored to You
- Your body, your history, your food preferences, cultural background, emotional experiences, and health needs are unique. Nutrition support should be suited to you not a one-size-fits-all plan.
- HAES-aligned approaches ensure that your care is weight-inclusive, respectful, and values your autonomy.
How to Access NDIS Nutrition Support
If you’re considering nutrition support under your NDIS plan, here are steps to get started:
- Work out whether your plan includes or can include supports under Capacity Building or other relevant categories relating to daily living, health, nutrition and wellbeing.
- Attend an initial dietitian consult, using your NDIS funding, to assess needs, current eating patterns, challenges, and goals.
- Consider including requests in your plan for meal planning, grocery support, meal preparation training or support worker time, in alignment with your needs and goals.
- Work with your dietitian to set goals that matter to you eating confidence, body trust, social meals, emotional ease, satisfaction, independence not just weight outcomes.
- Review progress over time: adjust goals, skills and support as your recovery proceeds.
- If you’re unsure what your plan covers or what you might be eligible for, talk to your support coordinator or your dietitian for guidance.
Why Choosing a HAES-Aligned Dietitian Matters
When you’re managing both a disability and issues around food/eating, the approach matters as much as the advice. Here’s why:
- Weight stigma is common in healthcare. A HAES-aligned dietitian works from a place of respect for all body sizes, avoiding shame or moral judgement about weight.
- You get to define your goals. The emphasis is on your health, your comfort, your relationship with food and body, rather than external pressures.
- Healing becomes sustainable. Non-diet, client-centred care helps you build lifelong trust and independence, rather than temporary solutions or repeated dieting cycles.
- You feel safer. Trauma-informed, compassionate care reduces the risk that food/nutrition support becomes another source of stress or shame.
- Outcomes are broader: better mental health, nutrition behaviours, body trust, social eating comfort, food satisfaction, emotional ease not just physical weight changes.
What to Expect from Relinquish on the Gold Coast
At Relinquish, our approach to NDIS nutrition & eating disorder support includes:
- A thorough initial consultation: your history, your relationship with food, emotional, social, physical, and practical factors all matter.
- Collaborative goal-setting tailored to you, such as improving confidence around food, social meals, emotional triggers, hunger/fullness awareness, meal planning, or independence.
- Practical, hands-on strategies: planning options that suit your tastes, culture, lifestyle; exploring cooking, grocery shopping, satisfaction; sensitivity to emotional needs.
- Trauma-informed, compassionate care; no shame, no rigid diet rules, no judgement.
- Coordination with your existing support network: psychologists, physicians, support workers, NDIS staff, other allied health.
- Flexibility: adapting pace, depth, skills, goals to whatever fits best for your recovery and life stage.
Conclusion & Call to Action
If you are an NDIS participant seeking freedom from diet culture, healing from disordered eating, greater independence in food planning/prep, or simply more peace with eating and your body you deserve support that honours your whole experience.
Relinquish on the Gold Coast is here to help you access nutrition care that is respectful, empowering, and aligned with your values. We’d love to hear your story, understand your needs, work with your NDIS plan, and walk beside you toward food freedom, body trust, well-being and confidence.