Compassionate and Informed Care for Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating
You deserve to have a trusting, kind, and friendly relationship with food, exercise and your body.
Many people are exhausted with trying to figure out how to manage and control their bodies. You may have near constant thoughts about food, calories, your body, or exercise. You may be focused on everything else and everyone else and struggle to feel good enough. Maybe you never feel like you quite measure up. Maybe it’s difficult for you to stay present and enjoy the moment with loved ones because you are so focused on your body size, or what you should and shouldn’t eat. Maybe you’ve been on a million diets. Maybe you feel like if you just need more “willpower.”
It’s not about “willpower,” and it doesn’t have to be this way.
I work with clients who are seeking treatment for the first time or who are being discharged from a higher level of care. I help people end their wars with food and their bodies and come to a place where they can let go of shame, embrace their full selves, and actually trust their body’s wisdom.
Here are some signs of disordered eating:
Preoccupation with food and/or your body, weight, or shape.
Restriction of what you eat, counting calories or following rigid food rules, and limiting the variety of foods you eat.
Bingeing, feeling out of control around food, or eating compulsively when you are not hungry.
Preoccupied with quality of food/or clean eating.
Cycling between periods of dieting and periods of overeating
Always looking for the next cleanse or “healthy” way to eat.
Exercising, purging, or abusing laxatives to compensate for what you’ve eaten.
Using food to cope with strong emotions.
Topics of therapy often include:
fear, guilt, or shame related to food or your body
weight stigma
restriction
self-induced vomiting
compulsive or obsessive exercise
negative body image
sizeism or body shaming
yo-yo dieting
perfectionism
rigid food rules
binge eating
emotional eating
self-criticism
Do I have an eating disorder?
It’s Time To Learn to Trust Your Body Again.
It’s so common to struggle with eating disorder behavior that you might find yourself questioning whether you really have an eating disorder or whether it’s bad enough to get help. In our diet culture being preoccupied with food and/or your body is pervasive. Moreover, behaviors of dieting (restricting) and exercise that result from these obsessions and pursuit of obtaining that “perfect” body are often praised, where appearance and physical fitness is often associated with being successful and happy. I know that the pursuit of thinness often results in bingeing or other compensatory behaviors, and most importantly we know your value has nothing to do with the size and shape of your body.
But hating yourself into a version of yourself you love doesn’t work. If you find yourself constantly dissatisfied with your weight/shape, preoccupied with food, caught in a cycle of yo-yo dieting, or finding that your self-worth is tied to your physical appearance, We’ll work together to help you break free from the obsessive thoughts, unhealthy behaviors, and deep fears that are keeping you stuck. and the pursuit of thinness.
Your struggle with food and/or your body may look different depending on the day, the week, the month, or even the phase of life you are in, but the results are the same — it is stealing the joy from your life.