Eating Disorders & Body Image

Evidence-based therapy for adults struggling with food and their bodies

Maybe food or calories are on your mind more than you'd like. Maybe you're stuck in a cycle of restricting and then bingeing, using exercise to "earn" meals, or following rigid food rules. Maybe it's less about food and more about how you feel in your body, and the constant comparison or self-criticism that comes with it.

Eating disorders and disordered eating show up differently for different people:

  • Disordered eating: Irregular patterns like skipping meals, rigid food rules, chronic dieting, or using food to cope with emotions, without necessarily meeting full diagnostic criteria.

  • Anorexia Nervosa: Restricting food intake to a lower body weight, alongside an intense fear of weight gain and a distorted body image.

  • Bulimia Nervosa: Cycles of binge eating followed by compensatory behaviors like vomiting, laxative use, fasting, or excessive exercise.

  • Binge Eating Disorder: Recurrent episodes of eating large amounts of food while feeling a loss of control, often followed by shame, without regular compensatory behaviors.

  • "Orthorexia": A preoccupation with eating healthy or "correctly," often involving significant dietary restriction and distress when those rules are broken.

  • Body image concerns: Negative evaluation of your appearance against an ideal, frequent checking or comparison, and self-worth tied to appearance or weight.

  • Compulsive exercise: Exercising by rigid rules or to compensate for eating, continuing through injury or illness, and/or distress when a workout is missed.

You don't need to fit neatly into one category, or meet a certain severity threshold, for this to be worth addressing.

My background and training with eating disorders

My work in this field goes back to my time as a Stanford undergraduate, when I served as a peer health educator and a research assistant in Stanford's Laboratory for the Study of Behavioral Medicine. In the lab, I helped with eating disorder prevention research and I continued in that lab as a doctoral student in the PGSP-Stanford PsyD Consortium. As a graduate student, I worked as a counselor at a residential eating disorder treatment center for adolescents, providing meal support and overnight care. For my postdoctoral fellowship, I specialized in the treatment of adult eating disorders at Stanford Psychiatry. After my training, I joined the clinical faculty at Stanford Psychiatry, where I provided individual treatment, led body image group therapy, conducted pre-bariatric surgery evaluations, and supervised trainees.

I'm also a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, meaning I'm specifically trained to help clients rebuild trust in their body's hunger and fullness cues. I'm also board certified in Clinical Psychology through the American Board of Professional Psychology, a credential requiring peer review beyond standard licensure. I meet weekly with a peer consultation group and pursue ongoing continuing education.

I’ve co-authored several peer-reviewed articles in this domain.

My approach

I believe full recovery is possible. My primary method of treatment for eating disorders is CBT-E (Enhanced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Eating Disorders), widely considered the leading evidence-based treatment for eating disorders in adults. CBT-E is transdiagnostic and it targets the specific processes maintaining the eating disorder, like overvaluation of shape and weight, dietary restraint, or binge eating, through a formulation built around your specific situation.

For clients whose binge eating is closely tied to difficult emotions, I also draw on DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) adapted for Binge Eating Disorder and Bulimia Nervosa. This teaches emotion regulation skills that target the link between painful emotions and bingeing, giving you ways to cope that don't involve food.

Exposure is also a major part of how I treat eating disorders. For example, clients may gradually practice eating fear foods, eating in front of others, leaving food on their plate, or not compensating after a meal. My training and certification in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), typically associated with OCD treatment, translates directly here.

Working with body image distress is often an important part of ED treatment. Research points to a few consistent strategies: understanding the cultural forces (sexism, racism, diet culture) behind appearance ideals, reconnecting with your values beyond appearance, auditing who and what you follow on social media, practicing self-compassion, and building appreciation for what your body does rather than how it looks. This work is most effective alongside treatment for any underlying eating disorder symptoms, not as a replacement for it, and unaddressed body image concerns are linked to a higher risk of relapse after treatment ends.

I often integrate Intuitive Eating principles as clients move further into recovery.