Eating Disorder Therapy

Do you want to form a healthier relationship with food, weight, and your body?

Maybe you wake up thinking about food and fretting about what you’ll eat each day. Perhaps you struggle to get dressed because none of your clothes fit the way you want them to and you can’t stop agonizing over your body in the mirror. Eating disorders can manifest in very different ways, but no matter what you’re going through, therapy can help you build a better relationship with yourself. If you find yourself obsessing over food, weight, or your body image, it may be time to book a therapist with experience supporting women with disordered eating.

What is eating disorder therapy?

Eating disorder therapy is specialized treatment for the thoughts, behaviors, and feelings that keep you locked into a painful relationship with food and your body. It isn’t general talk therapy with food added as a topic, and that distinction turns out to matter enormously, because most therapists receive very little training in eating disorders. It’s the reason so many women spend years in therapy that helps with everything except this.

Our practice was founded by Amanda White, LPC, who struggled with an eating disorder and substance use before she became a therapist and built Therapy for Women around what she wished had existed for her.

Our therapy team includes AJ Sarbaugh, LMFT, CEDS, who holds the field’s highest certification as a certified eating disorder specialist, along with a registered dietitian and psychiatric prescribers.

We don’t believe in food rules, or trying to change your body. We’re non-diet and size-inclusive, and our starting assumption is that your eating disorder has been solving a real problem for you. Treatment means understanding what that problem is and building something that works better.

Types of Eating Disorders We Treat

Our eating disorder therapy covers the full range of diagnoses, plus everything that never gets one.

Anorexia nervosa. Restriction, fear of weight gain, and a body image that doesn’t match what anyone else sees.

Atypical anorexia. The same symptoms and the same medical danger, without the weight loss that makes clinicians take it seriously. Women with atypical anorexia are frequently congratulated for the behaviors that are hurting them.

Bulimia nervosa. A cycle that’s exhausting to live inside and harder still to say out loud. Bulimia runs on secrecy, so treatment starts with somewhere safe to break it.

Binge eating disorder. The most common eating disorder there is, and the one most likely to be met with diet advice instead of actual treatment.

Orthorexia. When eating “clean” stops being a preference and starts running your calendar, your social life, and your sense of whether you’re a good person.

ARFID. Avoidant restrictive food intake disorder has nothing to do with body image. It’s driven by texture, by fear of choking or being sick, or by a genuine absence of interest in eating, and adults have it too.

OSFED. Serious eating disorders that don’t sort neatly into another category. This is not a lesser diagnosis, and it’s a common one.

Body dysmorphia. Preoccupation with a perceived flaw that other people can’t see, which often travels alongside disordered eating and sometimes arrives on its own.

Chronic dieting. If you’re sick of years of tracking, failing and starting again on Monday, or wondering about if your GLP1 use is healthy, we can help!

How Does Eating Disorder Therapy Work?

Eating disorder therapy here starts by figuring out what the eating disorder has been doing for you, then works on that and the behaviors keeping it running at the same time. Treatment is tailored to you, and we draw on several evidence-based approaches:

CBT-E is the leading outpatient protocol for eating disorders across diagnoses. It targets the mechanism underneath most of them, which is the overvaluation of weight and shape as a measure of your worth.

DBT builds distress tolerance and emotion regulation, which is what you need in the moment an urge arrives and you want to get through it rather than act on it.

ACT reconnects you with what you actually care about. Eating disorders narrow a life down to food and body, and this is how the rest of it comes back.

ERP addresses fear foods and food-related anxiety, gradually and at a pace you set.

EMDR matters because eating disorders and trauma travel together more often than not. Where there’s trauma underneath, treating only the eating rarely holds.

Health at Every Size and intuitive eating run through all of it. Our aim is to get you off the cycle of dieting, failing, and starting over, not to add one more set of rules to it.

Medication and Psychiatry for Eating Disorders

Eating disorders rarely arrive alone. Anxiety, depression, and OCD show up alongside them constantly, and treating those often makes eating disorder therapy more effective.

Our board-certified psychiatrist and psychiatric nurse practitioners see clients at our offices and online, and they take a less-is-more approach, which in practice means they’ll walk you through your options rather than push a prescription at you. Some women never need medication at all. For others it turns the volume down enough that therapy can finally get traction. Either way, your whole team is in the same building and talking to each other.