Coaching FAQs
What is Eating Disorder Recovery Coaching?
Now you’re probably thinking “What exactly is Eating Disorder Recovery Coaching?” To start, Eating Disorder Recovery Coaching is similar to Life Coaching, except there is a specific focus on healing your relationship with food and your body.
When working with me, my clients commit to a minimum of 3 month program. During this time, we meet weekly to set emotional and behavioral goals that are designed to help them make progress towards recovery. A lot of this work includes challenging rood rules and disordered behaviors, facing fears about food and weight, and strengthening their healthy self. Clients may also be assigned tasks between sessions that are designed to foster personal, spiritual, social, or intellectual growth.
If desired by the client, I remain in communication with their therapist, trusted family members and recovery team throughout the process to ensure that everyone is on the same page about their goals and progress.
When a client is need of additional support outside of sessions, I make myself available through text, call or e-mail to coach them through challenging moments. Similar to recovered peer mentoring programs, this is an immensely valuable part of the coaching process that is scientifically proven to make significant progress towards recovery.
What is Coaching and How is it Different from Therapy?
Have you ever been to a therapy session with all the breakthroughs and ugly crying, only to leave thinking, now what?
The moment you step out of your therapist’s tiny office, you want to turn around and bang frantically on the door shouting, “Wait! That’s it? How do I fix it?!”
Unfortunately, you don’t do that. Instead, you smile awkwardly at the other people in the waiting room, wonder if they can tell you just sobbed, and then you leave.
Suddenly, you step right back into the messy and complicated real world and continue with the status quo. Overall, therapy makes you feel better but you know deep down that you need more structure and continuous communication.
This is where coaching comes in.
Coaching picks up where therapy leaves off.
Coaches fill in the gaps of therapy by providing assignments and tools for you to do the emotional and behavioral work between sessions.
It’s an amazing and massively transformational way to support your mental health and work towards your heart’s goals at the same time.
In therapy, you are encouraged to talk in depth about your past and your feelings. Coaching is all about the here and now. What can you do today to take another step towards your goal?
Is Eating Disorder Recovery Coaching right for you?
Before you proceed- don’t let the word disorder turn you away. You do not have to be officially diagnosed with an eating disorder to work with me or any recovery coach (although a diagnosis could help you make that decision). I recommend you use the NEDA Eating Disorder Screening Tool to get a better idea.
How do you know an Eating Disorder Recovery Coach is right for you? First, if you’re googling it, this could be a sign it might be.
Besides that, you might feel obsessive about food, and not in a fun Rachel Ray kind of way.
In fact, you might be obsessed with food in a scary, toxic-relationship kind of way where emotions like guilt run high and you can’t stop thinking or worrying about it.
You know that deep down, your relationship with food is too complicated, too emotional, too strict or too chaotic to sustain a joyful, thriving life. You know, maybe on a micro-subconscious level, that there are red flags that you need to address (perhaps reluctantly).
These red flags appear as skipping meals, extreme calorie counting, constantly stepping on the scale, loss of your period, food restriction, bingeing, purging, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, substance use, secret eating, etc.
Overall, you’re white-knuckling your control over food and are ready to make your relationship with food casual and uncomplicated again so you can be truly free.
If everything I just said resonates with you, I encourage you to sign up for a free consultation today so we can discuss coaching in detail together.
