Services - OTR

Occupational Therapy for ED And DE

Eating disorders or disordered eating impacts all aspects of a person’s life. When ill, their primary occupation in day-to-day life is pursuing their eating disorder and all other meaningful aspects of life diminish causing their quality of life to grossly decline. As a result of the illness, a person will lose sight of their identity and purpose outside of their eating disorder, and daily tasks and activities are insidiously warped by destructive rules for engagement in life.

When pursuing recovery, you cannot think and talk yourself out of your eating disorder and through recovery; you have to do recovery. My aim is to help my clients explore, discover and build an occupational identity outside of their eating disorder and heal their relationship with food and their body. I also work towards re-establishing the function of day-to-day occupations in a way that holds purpose, is of value to the individual and is in line with recovery. By providing knowledge, skills and attitudes, it will allow sufferers to transition from dependence on their eating disorder to being independent from their ED. Having to find a deeper purpose and meaning to your life is essential to gain a foothold on your recovery.

As a Specialist Occupational Therapist, I provide online, in-person or experiential based sessions based on the client’s needs. I use talking style therapy alongside experiential- based therapy, the doing. This means that sessions can take place wherever occupation does- such as homes, school, work, cafe’s, gym classes or restaurants. Taking part in experiential- based activities that are meaningful to you are of great importance to the ED recovery process, as it allows you to have a lived experience in participating in something apart from your eating disorder. As you continue to engage with fulfilling occupations, there will be less time and value attached to the preoccupations to do with your weight and food behaviours.

Occupation Based Treatment

OT understands that illness is an occupation, and although this is highly destructive, the ED is purposeful to you. OT aims not to just take the illness-focused occupations away from you, but instead understand the meaning of occupation and try to change the perceptions and functions of those occupations over time. If you become reconnected with what is truly important in your life, the need for your eating disorder will diminish.

What does this look like:

Independent eating: follow a flexible and routined eating plan, which includes different types of eating environments, making food for yourself and allowing others to make food for you
Exercise: re-establishing the function of exercise and practising how to pursue a healthy relationship with movement
Rest and sleep: challenging your ED by learning to understand your body’s physiological needs and allowing yourself to rest and sleep enough to support recovery and strain
Work and productivity: this may be school, university or work. Supporting you to re-engage in work and productivity that has been disrupted due to impaired cognitive and physical function. This may also look like changing work occupations, discovery interim productivity occupations or supporting you in your current environment.
Challenging your beliefs about productivity versus rest
Self-care/ personal management: establishing tasks that have been diminished due to negative self- esteem or distorted body-image
Expanding leisure-based activities that have deteriorated due to obsessive ED thoughts and coping mechanisms and allowing you to build an identity outside of the ED pursuits
Spirituality: developing a perspective of building a relationship with your inner self, and not just your body.
Clothing shopping to suit changes in your body
Social engagement: re-integrating into social situations around food and establishing meaningful relationships
Build self-esteem by re-engaging in activities and areas of life, providing you with a sense of control, satisfaction in your ability and an improved sense of self

Food & Eating Behaviours

Meal support sessions: eating snacks, meals and fear foods together to challenge you to take behavioural and cognitive risks in a controlled environment.
Decreasing eating disorder table behaviours, rituals and ED paraphernalia and increase coping mechanisms.
Practising social food environments by learning to eat out, read menus, making timely decisions and figure out portions while supporting you to cope with thoughts, feelings and behaviours in the moment.
Building towards improved motivation and competency for self-directed meals: including recipe planning, grocery shopping, meal preparation and portioning
Accountability in following prescribed meal plan and self-directed eating.
Exposure and response prevention activities to help you challenge foods without using weight controlling behaviours.

Eating Disorder Related Focus

Providing knowledge and skills to enable you to accept and manage uncomfortable thoughts and feelings related to the ED.
Challenging rigidity, detail-focused thinking, perfectionism and other types of thinking styles through experiential-based work and activities
Working on decision making: building confidence and self-competency
Learning how to challenge the eating disorder through self- dialogue.
Managing thoughts, feelings and self- talk about your body and body-image
Body-image healing activities
Knowledge and skills to manage ED related behaviours such as bingeing and purging.
Learning to act for your healthy self-values.

For Professionals

Collaborations, Talks, Podcasts & Media

From the early years of my professional career, I have been hosted at schools, universities, focus groups, companies and radio to share evidence- based advice and my experience. As a licensed mental health professional, I am passionate about education and discussion around mental health and wellness, stigma around mental health topics, occupational therapy, eating disorders, disordered eating and nurturing our mental fitness in everyday life. I offer my expertise on a host of platforms including but not limited to podcasts, collaboration, online articles, social media posts and more.