What Does Recovery Look Like?

Full recovery encompasses physical, behavioral, and psychological normalization. Weight (and rate of growth for children and adolescents) is in an optimal range for the individual and is stable. Eating is normal and a variety of foods are consumed. Anxiety about shape or weight is...

What Kinds of Psychotherapy Help Eating Disorder Symptoms The Most?

Although the landscape of helpful psychotherapies for eating disorders continues to evolve, several promising interventions are already available. They differ somewhat in theory and practice but share several features. First, these talk therapies focus on the present—on the here and now. They are more...

Are There Medications That Are Helpful?

Medications are one tool in the eating disorders treatment toolbox. Several different types of medications can be useful, even dramatically so. Sometimes medications are prescribed for short periods of time—days or weeks—but more typically, people need to take them for weeks or months to...

Is Obesity an Eating Disorder?

We are often asked this question. It has a simple answer: No. To understand this answer, we need to start with the definition of obesity. Obesity is simply an excess of body fat; it is a physical state, not a behavior. Many...

Who Gets Eating Disorders?

There is a lot of misinformation about who develops eating disorders. At least in part, owing to inaccurate assumptions about who can and who cannot experience these disorders, nearly half of individuals with an eating problem do not receive specialty treatment for their symptoms....

Cognitive Neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience is the name of a field of study with the aim of understanding the biological processes that underlie thinking and behavior, with a specific focus on the connections in the brain involved in mental processes. The tools of cognitive neuroscience include...

Who Provides Eating Disorder Treatment?

Eating disorders are complex conditions, and adequate treatment commonly requires a team (multidisciplinary) approach. Navigating the landscape of treatment providers can be overwhelming, but it is worth taking the time to really understand who’s who in eating disorder treatment and what role they each...

Do Eating Disorders Overlap with Other Psychiatric Disorders?

Eating disorders do not occur in a vacuum. They have a high rate of overlap with depression and anxiety and a few other kinds of psychiatric disorders, which we will review in this chapter. The order in which an eating disorder develops in relation...

What Could Make an Eating Disorder Better or Worse?

Since eating disorders are potentially so serious, it is important to consider what factors may make the problem better or worse. Often individuals with eating disorders may want to tackle only some parts of the illness. For example, someone who has episodes of binge...

What Causes Eating Disorders?

Eating disorders are complex illnesses, associated with problems in emotions, behavior, and medical well-being. For many illnesses, the most effective treatments have come as a result of identifying the cause—for example, effective treatment for AIDS became possible only after a specific virus (HIV) was...