Hey there! I hope you are staying as safe as you can during this challenging time. It’s been a minute since my last blog post, and while I may have been more quiet on here than in past months, I've been excited and motivated by my hardworking clients, supportive family and peers, and the uptick in attention to mental health in the media. It feels refreshing to see mental health and eating disorders become less stigmatized, and I look forward to seeing these causes get the awa

By: Abby Emmert M.A. A large and challenging step of recovery is making peace with exercise. A question I get very often in sessions is,...

By: Gabby Morreale M.A. LPC. DBT-C. With the Christmas Holiday fast approaching, stress and anxiety about family interactions are often at an all-time high. I know that interacting with family can be fun and exciting but also challenging and difficult. It is a true example at dialectics at its best!! Sometimes these difficult interactions make us want to engage with our eating disorder behaviors. Gentle reminder: not now- not ever, is your eating disorder the answer. Remember

By: Rachel Dodson RD, LDN Fighting diet culture and all of the noise surrounding food can be tough all throughout the year, but especially during the holiday season. Now, I LOVE THE HOLIDAYS. The movies, the activities, giving (and getting lol) gifts, seeing people who you don’t get to see regularly and all the flavors of the seasons. This time of year is magical but can be a stressful time filled with tension and anxiety surrounding your relationship with food during recover

By: Hannah de Groot, MEd. Close your eyes and envision who comes to mind when you picture a person with an eating disorder. What does that person look like? For most of my life, the person I envisioned matched the images you’d get with a quick Google search - a young, white woman in body that looks very malnourished. For years, I imagined that the only way to actually have an eating disorder would be to look like that woman. To have an eating disorder, a person had to be whi

By: Hannah de Groot, MEd. With the 2021 Olympics starting this week, it seems like a perfect time to talk SPORTS! As a lifelong athlete and lover of competition, sports are one of my passions and an important part of my identity. While sports can facilitate meaningful friendships, teach discipline and hard work, and be a beautiful form of self expression, it is no secret that sports are not all fun and games (pun intended). Eating disorders run rampant in the sports world, a

Gabby Morreale MA LPC. Hey there! Did you know there are four different types of hunger? As an eating disorder therapist it is usually surprising to clients to find out that we often eat (75% of the time!) based on hunger that isn’t even physically driven. This may seem really confusing because eating in the absence of hunger seems.... unnatural? But we promise, this is normal! And we will show you why!  When working with clients to understand hunger and fullness we tend to g

By Hannah de Groot MEd. & Gabrielle Morreale M.A. LPC. We’ve officially entered May and the end of the semester is right around the corner! Whether you’re graduating high school (yay!) or gearing up for another semester in college, it’s time to talk about eating disorder culture on college campuses. More importantly, how seemingly normalized disordered eating habits are. So normalized that comments about food, diets, bodies and weight pass by ordinarily in everyday conversati

By: Abby Emmert & Gabrielle Morreale We get asked often from family and friends who have a loved one struggling with an eating disorder how to support them, how to talk to them, and what are the right/ wrong things to say. First, we want to acknowledge that if you are in this position, watching a loved one or friend go through this, we understand how hard this must be for you. Watching someone you love go through an eating disorder can be difficult and create feelings of hel

By: Abby Emmert & Gabrielle Morreale This week, a common topic of discussion was weight as it relates to health. If you are not aware of HAES, it stands for Health At Every Size, which our practice aligns with completely! The foundation of this philosophy is that size does not determine health. Basically, you can be healthy in a larger body and be very sick in a smaller body. Therefore, health cannot be attached to weight. When struggling with an eating disorder, this is a VE