A Journey Through Eating Disorders Support & Recovery

The benefits of athletics are well-established. Participating in organized sports can help you build self-esteem, recognize the value of teamwork, set the foundation for a lifelong physical activity practice, improve mental health, promote social connections, open the doorway for scholarships or even a career, and teach important life skills, such as goal-setting and leadership. However, these positive outcomes come with…

Cultural Values and Their Effects on Body Positivity In Hispanic and Latin communities, heritage is celebrated through many facets of cultural traditions, such as communal meals and familial hierarchy and bonds. In fact, family plays a large role for these individuals, with respect for one’s elders being strongly enforced. What the elders of the family say, goes, whether in relation…

When you’re searching for eating disorder treatment, the options can feel overwhelming—just the acronyms alone (IOP, PHP, FBT?) are dizzying. Often, the first decision you need to make is whether to choose inpatient or outpatient eating disorder treatment. In most cases, outpatient is the right choice, but what exactly does that entail? In this in-depth guide to outpatient eating disorder…

With the abundance of food, shared mealtimes, and large social gatherings, the holiday season can be immensely difficult for anyone living with or recovering from an eating disorder. Even as we shift into a more “normal” routine after pandemic-related disruptions, we continue to witness the impact of the last few years on people with eating disorders. According to Hilmar Wagner,…

Whether it be through advertising, social media, or even within supermarkets, we as people seem to continuously assign moral values to food. A practice that can be pretty harmful. What are food morality labels? Food morality is when we intentionally or unintentionally categorize food as “good” or “bad” which in essence assigns a moral value to food. It can also…

Your child starts exhibiting the signs of an eating disorder. You contact an eating disorder treatment center for help and receive a level of care recommendation that fits their needs. But you are unsure whether treatment is the right choice for your child at the moment. After all, they’ve made commitments to various groups, clubs, and sports—all activities that seem…

Almost all types of mental health conditions are more common among people who have an eating disorder. These conditions are often referred to as “co-occurring disorders.” One co-occurring disorder that has drawn a lot of attention from researchers and the public is obsessive-compulsive disorder. The relationship between eating disorders and OCD can be complicated, making it more difficult to treat…

Body weight and body mass index (BMI), while inaccurate and inappropriate for many reasons, are still used to indicate the presence and severity of an eating disorder. (1) This approach is not weight inclusive and can lead to misdiagnosis in those with "atypical" anorexia nervosa (AAN) who often present with “normal” or “above normal” body weight. (2) The Health at…

Many eating disorder symptoms have to do with bodies: being preoccupied with your body, going to great lengths to change it, having a distorted sense of what it looks like. Given that, it would be reasonable to assume that eating disorder treatment would focus on body image issues right upfront—but this isn’t the case. In evidence-based eating disorder treatment, body…

CW: Mentions of Suicide Pretty much anyone who knows me also knows that I've recovered from an eating disorder. As an eating disorder therapist, I’d shout it from the rooftops if I could! Why? Because in the midst of my eating disorder, I felt ashamed of who I was and felt like there was no way out. I thought a…