Therapy for Eating Disorders

What Can an Eating Disorder or Disordered Eating Look Like?

Eating disorders don’t all look the same.

You may notice:

• Constantly thinking about food
• Feeling anxious around meals
• Feeling guilty or ashamed after eating
• Having rigid rules about what, when, or how you can eat
• Labeling foods as “good,” “bad,” “clean,” or “unhealthy”
• Avoiding certain foods or entire food groups
• Skipping meals
• Frequently eating less than your body needs
• Feeling out of control around food
• Episodes of binge eating
• Purging or feeling urges to compensate after eating
• Exercising because you feel guilty about food
• Feeling distressed when you can’t exercise
• Frequently checking your body
• Avoiding mirrors or photographs
• Comparing your body to other people’s
• Weighing yourself frequently
• Feeling like your weight or appearance determines your worth
• Avoiding restaurants or social events involving food
• Eating differently around other people than you do alone
• Becoming increasingly secretive around food
• Difficulty concentrating because you’re thinking about food or your body
• Irritability, anxiety, or distress around meals
• Feeling terrified of weight or body changes
• Feeling like you’re never “sick enough” to deserve help

Sometimes the eating disorder voice can become so familiar that it’s difficult to separate what you actually want from what the disorder wants. Therapy can help you start untangling the two.

Different Types of Eating Disorders

Eating disorders can take several forms, and people’s experiences don’t always fit perfectly into one category.

Anorexia Nervosa

Anorexia nervosa involves restriction of food intake alongside an intense fear of weight gain or behaviours that interfere with weight restoration, as well as disturbances in how body weight or shape is experienced or evaluated. It’s important to understand that eating disorders cannot be identified simply by looking at someone’s body.

Serious restrictive eating and eating-disorder thoughts deserve attention regardless of appearance.

Bulimia Nervosa

Bulimia nervosa involves recurring episodes of binge eating followed by behaviours intended to compensate for eating, alongside significant concerns related to body shape or weight. Bulimia can be incredibly isolating because people may experience intense shame and work hard to hide what they’re going through. You don’t need to hide it here.

Binge-Eating Disorder

Binge-eating disorder involves recurring episodes of eating accompanied by a sense of losing control and significant distress. People struggling with binge eating often carry enormous amounts of shame.

You may repeatedly promise yourself:

“Tomorrow I’ll have more control.” Then restrict or create stricter rules. Eventually the cycle happens again. Treatment isn’t about giving you more rules or teaching you to have more willpower. It’s about understanding and changing the cycle.

ARFID

Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) involves restricted eating that isn’t primarily driven by concerns about weight or body shape. Food avoidance may relate to sensory characteristics, fear of negative consequences such as choking or vomiting, or very low interest in eating. ARFID can significantly affect nutrition, health, social experiences and everyday life.

OSFED & Other Disordered Eating

Not everyone struggling with an eating disorder fits neatly into one diagnostic category. Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder (OSFED) includes clinically significant eating-disorder symptoms that don’t meet the full criteria for another specific eating disorder. And some people experience disordered eating without having a formal diagnosis at all.

Your struggles don’t become valid only after they fit perfectly into a diagnostic box.

Eating Disorders & Body Image

For many people, eating-disorder recovery involves more than changing eating behaviours. Your relationship with your body matters too. You may have spent years believing that being thinner, smaller, fitter or somehow different would finally make you feel okay. Maybe you’ve postponed things until your body changes. You’ll wear that outfit later. Take photos later. Go swimming later. Start dating later. Feel confident later.

Live fully later. Therapy can help you explore where those beliefs came from, understand how body checking and comparison keep them going, and begin developing a relationship with your body that isn’t built entirely around appearance. The goal doesn’t have to be looking in the mirror every morning and thinking you’re amazing.

Sometimes recovery begins with something quieter:

Your body taking up less space in your thoughts so you can take up more space in your life.

How Can Eating Disorder Therapy Help?

Eating disorder therapy isn’t about taking away your coping strategies overnight and leaving you with nothing. Recovery is collaborative.

Depending on your needs, therapy may help you:

• Understand your eating-disorder patterns and triggers
• Reduce shame around food and eating
• Challenge rigid food rules
• Understand binge-restrict cycles
• Cope with urges to engage in eating-disorder behaviours
• Develop emotional regulation skills
• Improve body image
• Reduce body checking and comparison
• Explore perfectionism
• Develop more flexible thinking
• Work through anxiety around food
• Build self-esteem outside of appearance
• Understand the role control plays in your eating disorder
• Explore identity outside of the eating disorder
• Navigate relationships and social situations
• Develop self-compassion
• Process underlying trauma or difficult experiences when appropriate
• Work toward a life that isn’t organized around food and body concerns

Recovery isn’t about becoming perfect at eating. That would just be perfectionism wearing a different outfit. It’s about freedom, flexibility, connection and getting more of your life back.

Our Approach to Eating Disorder Therapy

There isn’t one version of eating-disorder recovery that works for everyone. Our therapists draw from evidence-informed and client-centred approaches that may include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), narrative therapy, psychodynamic approaches, and somatic approaches.

Treatment will depend on your age, symptoms, diagnosis, physical health, goals and the other supports involved in your care. We may work on practical strategies for interrupting eating-disorder patterns while also exploring what’s underneath them. Because sometimes you need help getting through tonight’s dinner. And sometimes we need to understand why controlling food became so important in the first place.

There can be room for both.

Eating Disorder Therapy in Oakville, Burlington, Milton and Online

We offer in-person eating disorder therapy at our Oakville offices, a short drive from Burlington and Milton. Our therapy offices are located in a residential home in Oakville. All sessions are by appointment only.

We also offer online eating disorder therapy across Ontario & select provinces. When it is appropriate, virtual sessions can work alongside medical, nutritional or other eating-disorder care you’re receiving in your community.