EATING DISORDERS

A brief look at eating disorders and disordered eating

These terms “eating disorder” often trip us up when it comes to legitimising distress with food and eating. Our understanding of eating disorders has been broadly constructed and defined by biomedical language that describes eating disorders as pathological and associated with observable markers of distress, such as low body weight, bingeing, purging and restriction. However, for the purpose of my work, I include the very real social factors that contribute to distress and I locate the origin of eating problems in more than just, the individual. It is hard to imagine how anyone can inhabit their body without distress in a culture that vilifies ageing, fatness, hair, and any sign of imperfection. Add to that very narrow appearance standards for what constitutes an attractive woman or man, to produce a rigid and gendered landscape of how to perform ‘normal’ appearance. With this in mind, trauma can also ‘nudge’ coping strategies towards self-silence, subjugation and protection from criticism or surveillance through manipulating food and eating. Trauma can also disturb how the gut digests food, leading to diagnoses of ‘intolerances’ or other issues that have their origins in the psychological. So, in short, there is no diagnosis that is required to access therapy. If you are struggling to inhabit your body in a way that has you overthink, obsess, avoid or struggle with food and eating, you’re deserving of support.

  • Preoccupation with food, weight, calories, or body shape
  • Distorted body image – feeling “fat” despite normal or low weight
  • Intentional or unintentional restriction of food
  • Cutting out entire food groups
  • Overthinking food and meals, ingredients
  • Meticulous planning of shopping lists and meals plans so that any spontaneity is denied
  • Unplanned and planned bingeing whether objectively so, or perceived
  • Purging after meals
  • Chewing and spitting
  • Nighttime eating
  • Secret eating
  • Shame following eating
  • Appearance concerns relating to how food and eating can aid internal distress
  • Rigid rules or rituals around eating (cutting food into tiny pieces, eating alone, excessive weighing)
  • Compulsive exercise, fasting, or purging to offset perceived overeating
  • Denial or minimisation of seriousness of weight loss or behaviours
  • Emotional dysregulation – using food restriction, bingeing, or purging to manage shame, anxiety, or numbness
  • Body and mirror checking
  • Feeling cold, extra body hair, thinning hair, poor oral condition, dizzy when standing up to fast, low mood
  • Reflux
  • Bloating
  • Big flux in scale weight upon eating something extra or different
  • Fear or anxiety around mealtimes

Not all people who are neurodiverse will experience and eating disorder, and not all people with eating problems are neurodiverse.That said, neurodiversity, particularly autism, ADHD, and sensory processing differences is increasingly recognised as a significant risk factor for eating disorders, especially restrictive types such as anorexia nervosa and ARFID. Research shows elevated rates of autistic traits among individuals with anorexia (estimates range from 20–35%; Westwood & Tchanturia, 2017) and higher rates of disordered eating behaviours in those with ADHD (Bleck & DeBate, 2013; Kittel et al., 2017). These overlaps appear linked to rigid thinking styles, sensory sensitivities, interoceptive difficulties, and heightened anxiety, which can make food routines, textures, and social eating particularly challenging. In practice, this may present as extreme selectivity, rule-bound eating, distress at change in routine, or difficulty sensing hunger and fullness. Understanding neurodiversity reframes such behaviours not as defiance or vanity but as attempts to regulate sensory, emotional, or cognitive overwhelm, requiring compassion, structure, and sensory-informed intervention. This makes the treatment plan slightly different than for allistic (or just not autistic) people because the underlying mechanism whilst often overlapping are not always similar.

My stance is as follows:

Many people grow up being told that gender is fixed; that we are born either male or female, and that everything from our bodies to our personalities must fit within one of those boxes. But research across genetics, medicine, and psychology now shows that this isn’t how human diversity really works.

Biologically, there is far more variation than most of us are taught. Some people are born with chromosomes that aren’t simply XX or XY (such as XXY or XO), or with hormone patterns and physical traits that sit somewhere in between. These natural variations, known as intersex traits, are estimated to occur in roughly 1–2% of the population, that is about as common as red hair. Even our brains show a mixture of traits traditionally labelled “male” or “female,” rather than fitting neatly into one category.

What this means is that gender isn’t determined by biology alone. It’s shaped by a blend of biology, lived experience, and the social world around us, the messages we receive about what it means to be “masculine,” “feminine,” or something else entirely. For some people, their internal sense of gender doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth, and for others, gender feels fluid, flexible, or not central at all.

In this space, I work from the understanding that there is no single “normal” way to be human. Gender diversity, including trans and non-binary identities is a natural expression of that richness, that certainly in terms of history has always been present in every culture and society of the world. Is is how we think about and talk about gender, that shapes how we inhabit our bodies.

Eating disorders and gender then, are deeply interwoven through sociocultural and discursive processes. (Discursive means how things are talked about.) Eating-disorder behaviours among trans and non-binary people can be understood not merely as symptoms, but as embodied strategies for managing painful gendered experiences. Practices of restriction, control, or modification of the body might rescript gendered embodiment, to distance from femininity that feels unfamiliar, negotiating dysphoria, and reclaiming agency over a body that feels socially or materially unsafe.

My stance ultimately reframes eating disorders as culturally and historically situated acts of meaning-making that are shaped by intersecting discourses of gender, sexuality, and power. My approach to working with you, is gender-expansive, intersectional, and sensitive to the lived realities of trans and non-binary people. My aim is that therapy won’t har you further by negating or invalidating your experience, but will offer a space to explore.

All eating disorder work begins with understanding the  history and pattern, the ways you’ve learned to manage emotion, control, and belonging through food, movement, and the body. Eating difficulties aren’t about vanity or willpower; they’re adaptive responses to distress, often born from a body and mind doing their best to stay safe.

Therapy begins by building safety in the room, in your body, and in your relationship with food. Safety allows for curiosity rather than judgment, and for regulation rather than control. Together we explore how the eating disorder has helped you cope, what function it serves, and what it might be protecting you from.

From there, we begin a process of education and understanding, not just psychological, but physiological. Drawing on the science of nutrition, metabolism, and energy balance, we look at how nourishment, restriction, stress, and rest impact the nervous system. When the body is undernourished or overdriven, its capacity for emotional regulation narrows. Understanding this biology helps bring compassion and logic to what can feel chaotic or shameful.

As trust develops, we work gently with emotion, tracking sensations, urges, and meanings held in the body. Emotions like shame, fear, and longing are approached not as problems to eliminate, but as signals that need care and interpretation. Through Schema Therapy, nutrition, EFT and somatic work, you begin to understand the deeper patterns, beliefs like “I must be in control,” “I’m too much,” or “I’m not enough”, and how they shape your relationship with food, body, and movement. Through this we’ll also meaning-make by exploring social and cultural discourses around your appearance and identity and how those discourses play into your unconscious rejection of your self, appearance or embodied sense, or yearning for something that might transform your experience.

The process also emphasises agency, helping you reconnect with body cues, appetite, and intuition. You learn to eat and move in ways that are guided by inner attunement rather than external rules. Movement becomes a way of inhabiting your body, not controlling it; nourishment becomes an act of care, not compliance. This is an imperfect, messy and non-linear journey.

Finally, recovery is grounded in kindness and self-compassion. This means recognising that healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but that we live in a culture that constantly reinforces appearance ideals and body hierarchies. Therapy doesn’t ask you to ignore this reality, but to develop resilience within it: to hold both the truth of cultural pressure and the right to live peacefully in your body, and fundamentally, the right to cultivate embodied safety using technologies and practices that nourish not destroy you.

Every person’s recovery journey is different. Some begin with restoring medical and nutritional stability; others come when patterns feel chronic or identity-defining. Wherever you start, therapy offers a space to bring body, mind, and nourishment back into conversation, so that eating, movement, and self-care can become expressions of life, not of fear.

I practice from a perspective of lived, research, clinical and practice experience. This doesn’t mean I know everything about your experience, but that I bring a lot of interpretation and perspective to our work.

Our relationship with food and our bodies is rarely just about eating. It’s about safety, control, identity, and belonging. In a culture that moralises food and idealises certain body types, many of us learn to treat our bodies as problems to be solved rather than places to live. Disordered eating often begins as a way to cope, to soothe, to find order, to feel safe, but over time, it can become rigid, isolating, and deeply consuming. What constitutes ‘disordered eating’ is also a very grey area, as much ‘disordered eating’ is considered contextually ‘healthy’ depending on context. For example, if we take public health messages literally, these tend to be ‘anorexified’ and over-simplified. This is why in my opinion, eating ‘disorders’ tend to exist on a spectrum of what constitutes ‘normal’ eating. For one person, disordered might be tolerable, for another, recovery might still appear disordered to some.

EATING DIFFICULTIES AREN’T JUST ABOUT FOOD OR WILLPOWER. THEY’RE A FELT EXPERIENCE, HELD IN THE BODY, SHAPED BY OUR HISTORY, AND REINFORCED BY A CULTURE THAT MORALISES HUNGER, CONTROL, AND APPEARANCE. THE PHYSIOLOGY OF EATING DISORDERS IS ABOUT SAFETY: WHEN WE FEEL THREATENED, WE RESTRICT, BINGE, HYPER-CONTROL, OR MOVE UNTIL WE’RE EMPTY, ALL IN SERVICE OF REGULATION, NOT VANITY. ULTIMATELY THOUGH, EATING DISORDERS ARE MULTIPLY EXPERIENCED BY ANYONE AFFECTED.

Difficulties with food and eating can present in childhood, or later. There are several diagnoses that require meeting certain criteria in the DSM-IV, like restriction, low body weight, weight loss, purging, hormonal disturbances, low self-esteem, and perfectionism. In my clinical, research and personal experience however, issues with eating are much more complicated than being concerned with weight and shape and often, people in distress will not meet those criteria, and will often not receive the care they need.

Eating issues are incredibly common, and can affect anyone, of any age, size or demographic. Undergirding eating problems neurodiversity (autism, ADHD), gender concerns for example feminisation or masculinisation, sexual trauma, objectification, self-silencing, grief, sensory issues and more. Eating disorders rarely appear alone, that is, they often are accompanied by mood difficulties, self-harming, suicidal ideation, and difficulties with relationships. Having a severe eating issue can be an incredibly lonely experience.

Whether you’re struggling with severe restriction, how to eat without fear, short or long term eating problems or any difficulty establishing a healthy relationship with food and your body, therapy is a good place to make sense of what’s happening and explore practical strategies psychologically, physiologically and nutritionally to move towards recovery.

Typical concerns that are often discussed in eating disorder therapy are:

  • Body weight
  • Exercise
  • Body shape
  • Gendered appearance ideals
  • Ethical eating, vegan/vegetarianism
  • Ultra-processed foods and health
  • Family meal scripts
  • Binge/purge and self-harm
  • Wasting food
  • Leaving the plate clean

  • Fear of dairy/gluten/wheat/carbohydrates/fat

  • Pros and cons of keto/paleo/high-protein
  • Sports nutrition/training
  • IBS and ‘recovery guts’ and distended bloating belly)

  • Meal size, timing and food selections

  • Chewing and spitting

Get in touch to start the ball rolling

In a sea of different therapists it can be overwhelming to know who to trust. That’s why you can call me for free and chat for 15 minutes. Tell me more about what’s ailing you and ask me how I might work with you.