Working Together

Offering private sessions and group support virtually and in the SF Bay Area.

Reaching out to a behavioral food therapist may make you feel vulnerable, scared, or intimidated. I strive to help my clients know they’re not alone and there isn’t something wrong with them. If you’d like to work with me, I will meet you where you are and help you feel seen, heard, and validated.

On this page, you’ll learn more about the values and processes that will influence our work together, what you can expect from our sessions, and how behavioral food therapy extends beyond food.

Pouring tea kitchen counter — Photo credit Angela Jazmin Studio

When to Seek Guidance from a Behavioral Food Therapist

If you’re looking for a partner to help unravel your beliefs, emotions, and perhaps unhealthy relationship with food, you may benefit from working with a behavioral food therapist. Behavioral food therapy is not for people seeking a quick-fix weight-loss solution or psychotherapy for a mental health disorder. Instead, it’s for individuals looking for support and guidance as they gradually shift their beliefs, mindsets and behaviors around food, body, and self.

Some indicators that you may benefit from talking to a behavioral food therapist include:

Feeling really reactive, impulsive, or habitual around food (e.g. emotional eating, bingeing, restricting), your relationships, your emotions, how you spend your time, and more
Having a hunch that these emotional and behavioral patterns are linked to unresolved childhood trauma or upsetting life experiences
Feeling preoccupied or even all consumed by thoughts of food and body
Recognizing that your food and body preoccupations are preventing you from being present or enjoying life
Feeling exhausted by the need to be in control
Recognizing you’re falling into old patterns that may be self-sabotaging or harmful and feeling tired of doing the same things that aren’t serving you
Recognizing that you value, and could benefit from, a close and safe partnership to help you dig deeper
Feeling ready and willing to invest time and patience in your healing journey and take an active part in the process

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How I Can Help You

Working with a behavioral food therapist is a partnership. I will meet you where you are and we will co-create your healing path together. Think of it this way: You’re behind the steering wheel, deciding when to turn, accelerate, and brake. I’m right next to you in the passenger seat, helping navigate, pointing out rest stops, and suggesting when to detour or go back a few miles.

While the starting point for each person is different, we may begin by:

Bringing compassionate awareness to the role food has played in your life
Addressing body awareness and strategies to tune into your nervous system and the wisdom that your body holds
Bringing attention and curiosity to the emotions, thoughts, and/or interactions that trigger impulsive or reactive behavior
Breaking the binge-restrict cycle
Learning self-soothing skills to help regulate the nervous system, ride the waves of emotions, and build tolerance for discomfort
Establishing self-worth that’s not connected to weight
Understanding how traumatic experiences have impacted emotional patterns, body beliefs, and food behavior
Building a foundation of tools to prepare and enjoy balanced meals at regular intervals

Journaling in bed — Photo credit Angela Jazmin Studio

What You Can Expect

I provide one-on-one (individual) behavioral food therapy sessions as well as small group programs both virtually and in person. I work with private clients on average between 6-12 months. And I offer a flexible sliding scale, making private sessions more affordable and accessible to a wider range of clients.

During our sessions together, I will stand in your corner and help you understand how past and present experiences influence where you are today — both when it comes to your relationship to food and your relationship to other distractions or elements of your life that aren’t serving you.

While each person’s healing process looks different, you can expect to:

Set intentions: We will clarify your intentions for our work together and define the specific goals you want to work toward.
Explore your food and body story: We will dig into the role food has played in your life and the factors that have influenced your relationship with food and body. We will also connect the dots to understand the root causes of the emotional patterns and behavior that influence those relationships.
Build resources: We will establish a foundation of perspectives and practices that allow you to feel calm and grounded in your daily routine and safe connecting to your body. We will also identify the core values you want to guide how you show up for yourself each day.
Gain insight: We will build self-compassion, body attunement, and emotional awareness skills so you can better trust your body and choices.
Experiment and practice: We will use body-based insight and other concrete tools to ease food and body preoccupation, self-soothe before turning to food, and break emotional eating or binge-restrict patterns.
Cultivate self-trust and establish a wellness toolbox: We will explore strategies to be more attentive to your needs and make intentional food and body choices — and how these strategies contribute to deeper self-respect and self-worth. Then we will collect a diverse set of tools that will help you feel more capable, resilient, and flexible navigating and responding to uncomfortable emotions, uncertainty, and seasons of transition.

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Therapeutic Coaching Orientation

Integration of the Whole Person - Mind/Body/Spirit

Mindfulness Practices

Nervous System Regulation

Values Directed

Non-Diet Practices - Intuitive Eating

Weight Inclusive - Health at Every Size

Trauma Sensitive

Self Compassion & Radical Acceptance

Somatic (Body) Attunement

Expressive Outlets

My Values as a Behavioral Food Therapist

My work values and life values have a lot of crossover. That’s because I wholeheartedly believe in living an authentic life built on the foundation of mindful awareness and intentional choices. I also believe in making room for indulgences (hello, sweet treats every. single. day.) and spontaneity (there’s more than one way to do things, and it doesn’t always have to be the perfect way). When working together, I will always guide our conversations around the following three values.

Intentionality

Turning toward yourself — tuning into what your body and your emotions are telling you

Being present for your choices — it’s not about making the right choice; it’s about making a conscious choice

Compassionate Nurturing

Taking care of and being attentive to yourself

Practicing self compassion, especially when feeling alone, discouraged, or stuck

Expression

Recognizing the many different (gentle and supportive) outlets that offer a release, reset, and reprieve from all that life throws your way

My Approach to Behavioral Food Therapy

As a behavioral food therapist, I blend training in behavior change, mental health, eating psychology, intuitive eating counseling, integrative nutrition coaching, mindfulness, and trauma sensitivity to help clients cultivate a healthier and more sustainable relationship to food and body.

In our work together, we will blend the values of intentionality, compassionate nurturing, and expression with these three approaches.

The Trauma-Sensitive Approach

Trauma and traumatic experiences — large or small — are at play in our relationship with food and body. I use a coaching model to support you in your healing and growth while being aware of how and why you may get activated and triggered. I will help you connect these dots in order to bring what’s happening at a subconscious level to the surface (conscious level) so we can work with it gently but directly.

The Health at Every Size Approach

By strengthening your mental and emotional well-being, how you think about and treat your body, and how you show up in your life as a whole, you can see the bigger picture of your healing process. Backed by research and clinical insight, I don’t support weight loss as a health goal. Instead, I help you learn mindfulness, body awareness, emotional fluency, nervous system regulation, and self-compassion skills to help you disentangle your worth from your weight, align your behaviors with your values, and develop an identity beyond your physical body.

The Non-Diet Approach

True nourishment and well-being stem from mental, emotional, spiritual, behavioral, physical, and relational sources. You won’t feel truly satiated and satisfied without emotional attunement and a deeper connection with yourself. I use a non-diet approach to help you value and attend to all of these areas so you’ll feel more satisfied on a deeper level — and have less of a need to turn to food to meet non-food needs.

How Our Work Together Can Extend Beyond Food

We often turn to food for non-food reasons. That’s because food can serve as a quick and easy outlet for us to disconnect and turn off. But the act of disconnecting is ultimately unsatisfying because we’re not being nourished or getting our needs met. Ultimately, how we behave with food reflects how we carry ourselves in life.

Once we’re intentional in one area we feel better about ourselves and how we showed up — and that has a ripple effect. Being mindful is a transferable skill. In other words, once we learn to be mindful about our food choices, we can practice being more aware and intentional in other areas of our lives, including:

Identity development
Life transitions (like a move, a breakup, or a change in career/body/lifestyle/life roles)
Relationships
Time management
And more

So what does this all mean for you? In our sessions together, I can help you gain awareness and skills to slow down, tune in to yourself, understand your needs, and compassionately recognize what you need to do to support those needs. Together, we can identify your values and challenges and help you gain more overall self-awareness. Then, you can apply this knowledge to your life beyond your food habits.

This work is all about feeling conscious about your choices — whether that means consciously deciding you’d like to enjoy a doughnut or whether or not you’d like to purchase a new sweater or how to navigate a tricky work situation. I encourage my clients to recognize that the behavioral food therapy process is just that — a process. The act of being a human means we’re in transition and we’re in between spaces all the time. Healing isn’t an upward trajectory. You may find yourself in a session where you feel like you’re regressing or not making the same level of progress you were before. This too is part of your healing. We often gain more insight from the challenging times. And I’m here to help you honor and navigate all that being “in process” involves and to celebrate baby steps.

Behavioral food therapy is not about judging, always making the right choice, or perfecting your lifestyle. It’s about getting curious about how and why we make the choices we do. We evolve over time and so do our needs. By working together, you can gradually add meaningful tools to your toolbox that will allow you to better weather shifts in life, whether they’re subtle or groundbreaking.

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