Helping You Create a Positive Relationship with Food and Your Body
You hate what you see in the mirror. You feel overwhelmed by food choices. You negotiate every bite. You are drowning in thoughts about food and your body. You want to stop using so much of your brain space thinking about your weight. We can help.
We can help you find a flexible and peaceful relationship with food and body!
Tell me about your worst eating disorder day.
Maybe you didn’t eat at all. Maybe a binge left you in physical pain. Maybe you had to spend so much time compensating for what you ate that you missed out on time with friends. Or maybe that you felt so ashamed by how you looked that you didn’t go to a special event. You don’t have to do life this way. Therapy at The Current can help. We can help you gain control over your thoughts and behaviors surrounding food. We can help change the relationship you have with food and your body.
Eating Disorders are the tip of a deep ice berg.
We know that eating disorders are often a coping mechanism, developed over time as a way to cope with painful experiences, anxiety or depression. And then they spiral out of control. Eating disorders have a way of taking over a person. They can distort our thoughts and our images. They can make you feel like you have no power, yet powerful all at the same time. Our therapists’ job is to help you uncover what is underneath that ice berg. Read below to understand how eating disorders can become coping mechanisms for anxiety or neurodivergent experiences.
Eating disorders are complex and require a specialized treatment team.
At The Current, you receive specialized treatment. All of our therapists have put in countless training hours towards being specialized in treating eating disorders. We know the value of multi-disciplinary treatment team work. Your therapist will work collaboratively with your dietician, medical doctor, and/or psychiatrist to ensure that you have all the pieces you need for sustainable recovery.
Depending on your unique needs, we use a combination of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Eating Disorders (CBT-ED), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Radically Open DBT (RO-DBT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help you recover from the eating disorder. A combination of these evidence-based therapies help you to challenge eating distorted thoughts, follow your customized meal plan, and improve your body image. Once we gain control over eating disorder thoughts and behaviors, we can dive a bit deeper and start chipping away at that iceberg under the surface of the eating disorder. This will lead you to sustainable recovery.
Schedule with one of our therapists today to help you manage your patterns of disordered eating.
The Connection between Eating Disorders and Anxiety
Many of us who struggle with an eating disorder also have high levels of anxiety. The two can become intertwined. Anxiety is experienced both in the body and in the mind. It can hyper-activate or slow down different systems in our body to help protect us against threat. It has a big impact on our digestive system. Experiencing anxiety sensations can physically make it harder to eat. Sensations such as jaw tension, muscle tension, and upset stomach can all contribute to this. When in a state of threat, eating becomes a low priority. Your body feels urgency and it is focused on moving or getting ready to shut down (freeze). Thoughts tend to move fast and become overwhelming. It is incredibly difficult to make decisions in this state. The act of eating involves many decisions such as where to eat or what to eat. The sensations of anxiety are also incredibly uncomfortable. The urge to get rid of them is strong. These distressing sensations are often calmed by increasing physical activity, restriction, purging or bingeing.
Anxiety is also connected to body image. Anxiety can include a persistent fear of being judged by others and experiencing discomfort when being "watched". Judgement can be interpreted as a threat. To avoid potential criticism or public induced shame, we often attempt to control this anxiety by controlling our appearance.
Anxiety and an eating disorder can be woven in a tight cycle. Often times anxiety pre-dates the onset of the eating disorder. Eating disorder behaviors, such as restriction, bingeing, purging or compulsive exercise come into play when a person is attempting to cope with uncomfortable anxiety. Eating Disorder behaviors are regulating in that they often “shut down” the nervous system, brining on a feeling of numbness (which in the moment, can feel better than anxiety). Over time the source of anxiety can become related to food, weight and body. And therefore, ED behaviors increase to cope with the distress related to those sources.
The therapists at The Current know how to help you unravel this tight cycle. They can teach you the skills necessary to cope with your anxiety effectively and put a stop to using eating disorder behaviors to achieve anxiety relief. Contact us today to see how we can help or check out our workbook on Anxiety and Eating Disorders.
The Connection between Eating Disorders and Neurodivergence
Neurodivergent experiences often intersect with eating disorders. For years, these two areas were treated as separate concerns—but research, lived experience, and clinical insight now show a strong connection between them. Research indicates a significant co-occurrence between ADHD, Autism and OCD and eating disorders. These recent statistics highlight the importance of integrated screening and treatment approaches that address both ADHD or ASD and eating disorders simultaneously. At The Current, all of our eating disorder specialized therapists have done their due diligence to increase our knowledge about neurodivergence so that we can adapt our treatment approach to meet the needs of our clients.
Why Eating Disorders Often Co-Occur with Neurodivergence
Eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder, and ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) are complex conditions. But for neurodivergent individuals, several factors can increase risk. Below is a list of some of the common traits or experiences with neurodivergence and how they can overlap with eating or body image issues.
Sensory Sensitivities: You may have always been seen as “picky” about your food, but what you were really experiencing was overwhelming textures, smells, or temperatures, and an urge to avoid what was overwhelming or unpleasant. For some, this leads to chronic under-eating or a diagnosis like ARFID where there can be a strong preference for certain types of food or avoidance of certain types of food or food related experiences. For others, sensory overload leads to binge eating as a form of soothing or numbing.
Interoceptive system: Interoception is defined as the “process of how the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body”. This can present as difficulty noticing your own thirst, hunger, and fullness cues and/or there may be overwhelming interoceptive experiences. This can make consistent food intake and hydration challenging.
Executive functioning: Executive function refers to skills that you use to manage everyday tasks like making plans, solving problems and adapting to new situations. It also manages memory and motivation. It can be overwhelming to perform all the steps necessary for consistent food intake including the processes of buying, preparing, cooking, & cleaning up. Challenges in executive functioning can also make task switching difficult. There is often fear that there will be no motivation or energy to return to the task later, or it might be forgotten, if time and attention is taken away to eat.
Hyperfocus: ADHD is not a deficit in attention, it is actually an abundance of attention and difficulty regulating or managing it. This sometimes results in hyperfocusing on a special interest or a task and when this happens, sometimes forgetting to eat or not wanting to stop the activity to eat.
Impulsivity: Increases binge eating risk with reactivity to food choices or loss of control when eating. Neurodiverse individuals also commonly experience low dopamine levels and may unknowingly seek out dopamine increases through pleasurable or large amounts of food.
Rigidity: Rigidity can show up as having difficulty adapting to a change of plans around food, meal times, or eating environments. Or by having difficulty with coping with an unknown experience with food (some examples could be pressure to try something new or not knowing what is on the menu). It can also show up in the desire to have a very predictable routine with food choices and eating environments.
Rejection Sensitivity: Rejection sensitivity is a trait that can show up with Autism or ADHD that makes a person expect, perceive, and react intensely to rejection, real or perceived. They may have a strong desire to meet societal ideals with food choices and amounts. This may also include trying to conform to society’s “ideal” body type as to not experience rejection.
Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA): Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) refers to a specific profile within the Autism spectrum, where individuals have an increased sensitivity towards demands that challenge their autonomy. Tasks that appear simple such as being told to have breakfast can evoke significant emotional responses in individuals with PDA, this response can send them into “fight or flight”, making complying with task incredibly challenging.
Stimulant Medication: Common medications for ADHD can have an affect on appetite, often appetite suppression.
Co-Occurring Physical Issues: Autism and ADHD have higher rates of co-occurrence with physical ailments such as GI issues, Ehlers Danlos syndrome, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and POTS that can make consistent and comfortable eating difficult.
What Affirming Treatment Looks Like
Healing doesn’t mean “fixing” or “taking away” these traits. It means building a life that works for your brain and body, not against them.
At The Current, we offer affirming, neurodiversity-informed support that can include:
Sensory-aware meal planning
Safe, consensual exposure work that is aware of sensory overwhelm
Support for executive functioning around eating habits
Emotional regulation or emotional expression tools. Understanding of stimming behaviors.
Curious exploration of the intertwining of your neurodivergent experience and eating or body image issues
Therapists who get the nuances of life long masking, encourage unmasking and internalized abelism
Therapists who also identify as neurodivergent
If the treatment doesn’t account for sensory overload, executive functioning challenges, or a neurological need for structure, it’s not resistance—it’s mismatch. If you’ve ever been blamed for not “progressing” fast enough or have heard things like: “You’re just being resistant.”, “Why can’t you follow the meal plan?”, “You need to be more flexible.”, then your treatment has not been affirming.
It’s important to know that you are not broken. Whether you're neurodivergent, struggling with disordered eating, or both, affirming support is available.
Therapy can help untangle the complex relationship between brain wiring, emotions, and eating behaviors. It can also help you build a more compassionate relationship with food, your body and your mind.
At The Current, we’re here to meet you where you are—with understanding, curiosity, creativity, and care. Reach out to us today to see how we can help!