Talk therapy

Talk therapy, also known as psychotherapy, is the most important part of eating disorder treatment. It involves regularly seeing a psychologist or another mental health professional with specialized training in eating disorder care.

Therapy may last from a few months to years. It can help you:

• Make your eating patterns better and help you reach a healthy weight.
• Replace habits that aren't healthy with healthy ones.
• Create problem-solving skills.
• Find healthy ways to cope with stress.
• Make your relationships better.
• Make your mood better.

Treatment may involve one of several types of proven eating disorder treatments, such as:

• Enhanced cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT-e). This type of talk therapy can be helpful for bulimia nervosa or binge-eating disorder. It focuses on behaviors, thoughts and feelings related to your eating disorder. After helping you gain healthy eating behaviors, it helps you learn to recognize and change distorted thoughts that lead to eating disorder behaviors. It has not been shown to be effective for anorexia nervosa.
• Family-based treatment. During this therapy, family members learn to help you regain healthy eating patterns and reach a healthy weight until you can do it on your own. This type of therapy can be especially useful for parents learning how to help a teen with an eating disorder.
• Dialectical behavioral therapy. This type of therapy has been proven to help binge eating or some symptoms of bulimia. It's a mix of group and individual therapy that helps you develop skills to manage distress, control emotions and have healthy relationships. Often this therapy involves phone coaching when you need more support in the moment.

Your psychologist or another mental health professional may ask you to do homework. This could include keeping a food journal to review in therapy sessions and figuring out what causes you to binge, purge or use other eating behaviors that aren't healthy.