SESSIONS
Photo credit: Angela Jazmin Studio
If you’re looking to feel more empowered about your connection to your mind and body, and at ease with your relationship to food, you’ve come to the right place.
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.
My goal as a behavioral food therapist, and as a human, is to help you feel more nurtured, satisfied, and nourished so you don’t need to turn to food or another distraction to fill a void. Together, we can move past the narrative that food is the problem. We’ll start to uncover the perfectly legitimate and valid reasons why you — just like so many others — have turned to food and other coping mechanisms for comfort and distraction.
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.
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 and body.
Some indicators that you may benefit from talking to a behavioral food therapist include:
Feeling preoccupied or even all consumed by thoughts of food and body
Feeling really reactive, impulsive, or habitual around food (e.g. emotional eating, bingeing, restricting), your relationships, how you spend your time, and more
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
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
Bringing awareness to the emotions, thoughts, and/or interactions that trigger impulsive or reactive behavior
Breaking the binge-restrict cycle
Learning self-soothing skills to help calm 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 body beliefs and food behavior
Addressing body awareness and strategies to tune into hunger cues
Building a foundation of tools to prepare and enjoy balanced meals at regular intervals
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.
Therapeutic Coaching Orientation
Integration of the Whole Person - Mind/Body/Spirit
Mindfulness Practices
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 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 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.
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, emotional fluency, body awareness, and self-compassion skills to help you disentangle your worth from your weight and develop an identity beyond your physical body.
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 mindful 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
Wardrobe
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 recognize what you need to do to meet 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 outside of what and how much you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
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 go on a second date. 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.
Interested in Learning More?
When you’re ready to chat, we can schedule a 30-minute consultation where we’ll discuss what you’d like to work on and how I can support you.