The purpose of this paper is to establish a quantitative and constructive stability result for a class of subcritical Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequalities. We develop a new strategy, in which the flow of the fast diffusion equation is used as a tool: a stability result in the inequality is equivalent to an improved rate of convergence to equilibrium for the flow. In both cases, the tail behaviour plays a key role. The regularity properties of the parabolic flow allow us to connect an improved entropy-entropy production inequality during the initial time layer to spectral properties of a suitable linearized problem which is relevant for the asymp-totic time layer. Altogether, the stability in the inequalities is measured by a deficit which controls in strong norms the distance to the manifold of optimal functions.