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 folks 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.

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

Health at Every Size (R)* Approach

Regardless of a client's weight, body size, or eating disorder diagnosis, I work from a non-diet approach. This means that I support clients in trusting their own bodies and their own selves as they make changes that support their entire well-being, which includes physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. I do not expect or encourage weight loss or adherence to specific dieting or exercise techniques.

Many of my clients say "I have struggled with my weight for my entire life."  Some say that they have "never been able to stick to a diet." In reality, I have found that my clients do not lack "willpower" whatsoever, and that they have tried relentlessly to pursue weight loss. Unfortunately, our culture's extreme focus with dieting and weight loss often produces the exact opposite result: more obsession with food and increased dissatisfaction with our bodies.

The Health at Every Size (R) philosophy offers an evidence based, gentle, lasting approach to wellness and peace with food and our bodies.

From the Association of Size Diversity and Health, the Health at Every Size (R) Principles are:

Weight Inclusivity: Accept and respect the inherent diversity of body shapes and sizes and reject the idealizing or pathologizing of specific weights.

Health Enhancement: Support health policies that improve and equalize access to information and services, and personal practices that improve human well-being, including attention to individual physical economic, social, spiritual, emotional, and other needs

Respectful care: Acknowledge our biases, and work to end weight discrimination, weight stigma, and weight bias. Provide information and services from an understanding that socio-economic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and other identities impact weight stigma, and support environments that address these inequities.

Eating for Well-being: Promote flexible, individualized eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than any externally regulated, eating plan, focused on weight control.

Life Enhancing Movement: Support physical activities that allow people of all sizes abilities, and interests to engage in enjoyable movement, to the degree that they choose.

*Health At Every Size and HAES are registered trademarks of the Association for Size Diversity and Health and used with permission