Yoga and Eating Disorders: How a Practice Can Support Recovery

When I was 18 and a freshman in college, I was living in quasi eating disorder recovery and consumed by crippling anxiety and regular panic attacks that made it hard to function. My mother suggested I sign up for a yoga class offered at my school and, out of desperation, I went. I was skeptical that it would help. Little did I know, showing up to that class was a huge step toward full freedom from my eating disorder.

Originating from ancient India thousands of years ago, yoga’s name comes from the Sanskrit word “yuj,” which means “to yoke” or “to unite,” and its ultimate purpose is to unite and harmonize a person’s body, mind, and spirit, and their connection to their world around them. Beyond helping people achieve this sense of harmony, yoga also has a number of proven health benefits, including reduced stress, anxiety, back pain, and depression, and improved sleep, blood pressure, concentration, and coordination.

When you think of yoga, your mind probably goes to a physical posture, like downward dog—and while the physical practice is a key aspect of yoga, it’s one of many others. Outside of the poses, yoga includes elements like meditation and breathing techniques, several guiding ethical principles, self-study, and service. “Yoga is a practice that captures many experiences that can take place off of the yoga mat,” says Equip Director of Peer Mentorship, Maris Degener, who also found yoga helpful in her eating disorder recovery. “For me, yoga has been a supportive framework for connecting to myself, finding harmony between things that feel like opposites, and becoming closer to those around me.”

Eventually, my yoga mat became a safe space to slow my mind without judgement, listen to and move my body with compassion, connect to my breath and a higher power, surrender what no longer serves me, and let myself feel big emotions. Read on to learn more about the relationship between yoga and eating disorders, including its benefits in recovery, different types, potential risks, and when and how to incorporate it into your recovery.

Benefits of yoga in eating disorder recovery

As a yoga student and teacher and eating disorder survivor and dietitian, I believe the holistic practice of yoga can have a significant, positive impact in recovery when it’s practiced safely, for the right reasons, and alongside medical and therapeutic interventions. Importantly, research shows yoga can benefit eating disorder recovery: in one 2018 study of females with eating disorders who started practicing yoga, participants showed reduced eating disorder psychopathology after the yoga intervention and at the six-month follow-up.

Here are some of the research-backed ways that yoga can support eating disorder recovery:

Embodiment

Eating disorders sever the connection between mind and body, and yoga can help reconnect the two and foster positive embodiment (or the ability to feel a mind-body connection). Embodiment is powerful in recovery, since eating disorder thoughts typically consist of rigid rules around food and movement choices—choices that have nothing to do with how our bodies feel or what they might be communicating to us about their unique needs.

“Yoga postures, especially when done with a therapeutic intention and pranayama breathing practice, are pathways to embodiment, which is an essential part of recovery, because living with an eating disorder is a disembodying experience,” says yoga therapist and founder of Yoga for Eating Disorders Jennifer Kreatsoulas, PhD, C-IAYT. “These practices guide us toward our body rather than away from it. This is a huge paradigm shift, because living with an eating disorder is a state of turning away from one's body.”

Interoception

One side effect of disembodiment is a difficulty feeling our internal sensations, an ability known as interoception. “We know eating disorders can interrupt our interoceptive awareness, or ability to connect with and understand internal cues like hunger and fullness. Yoga helped me rebuild those connections over time,” Degener shares.

I have also found my yoga practice (and many of my clients’ yoga practices) helps foster connections to authentic preferences and desires, with both food and other areas of their life.

Emotional processing and coping

Although I’ve been living in full recovery for years, my yoga mat continues to be a place where I can help myself feel, express, and process the full spectrum of emotions—which live not only in the mind, but also in the body. It’s a place where I can come back to my authentic self and quiet down enough to hear what I need, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Kreatsoulas says yoga helps us “cultivate our inner resources to cope with challenging moments and be more present in our life.” One 2022 review showed yoga’s impacts on participants include increased self-compassion, feelings of centeredness, and improved coping skills. Plus, many yoga practices (like breathing techniques) can be used off the mat, like at mealtimes and during other potentially difficult moments that arise on a person’s path to recovery. “These practices help regulate the nervous system, which is key because healing happens when we’re in a rest-and-digest state, not fight-or-flight,” Kreatsoulas says.

Body image

Often, body image distress is a significant piece of the eating disorder puzzle, and research shows yoga can help heal people’s relationships to their bodies. One 2024 study of females with eating disorders showed that yoga helped some of them to focus on what their bodies feel like from within (rather than what they look like on the outside) and connect with their bodies’ strength and power. Another 2019 study of college students showed a link between practicing yoga and improved body image, body appreciation, and self-compassion, as well as decreased concern with physical appearance.

Kreatsoulas describes yoga as a path to softening and even transforming harsh body beliefs: “Through the path of yoga, we practice harmony within and strengthen our relationship with our body,” she says.

Community and spirituality

Since yoga is often practiced in group settings, it can be a helpful way to cultivate a sense of belonging and connection with others. “I found community through this practice, where my eating disorder often led to isolation and loneliness,” Degener shares.” Additionally, yoga can serve as a source of spiritual connection, and foster feelings of gratitude and connection to a higher power. This connection can help some people better align with their values, rather than the values of the eating disorder, as well as regain a sense of perspective and calm during challenging moments.

Non-violence

While there are several yogic principles and ethical guidelines that support recovery, I find the principle of non-violence (“ahimsa”) to be the most helpful in recovery. Degener said she found studying non-violence in her practice helped her reflect on the ways in which her eating disorder caused harm to both herself and those around her. The principle of ahimsa reminds us that practicing yoga (both on and off the mat) is about treating ourselves (including our bodies) and each other with care and compassion.

What is yoga therapy vs “regular” yoga?

You may have heard of the term “yoga therapy,” which is different from typical group classes you can take in studios, gyms, or online. So what exactly is yoga therapy? As Kreatsoulas explains, “yoga therapy is a private session that focuses on the practices, tools, and philosophies of yoga to support clients.” While yoga teachers typically focus on certain yoga methods for their groups of students, yoga therapists generally start with each individual client’s needs—which usually include symptom reduction and relief from a health condition—and utilize yoga principles and practices to address them.

For people in eating disorder recovery, Kreatsoulas says yoga therapy can effectively complement traditional therapeutic techniques by involving the body while healing the mind. “Whereas a client may work with their therapist on the specific nuances and symptoms of their eating disorder experience, yoga therapy is the space to explore where certain feelings like fear live in the body and create practices of self-compassion to integrate into daily life,” she says. “We can process in real time what comes up for clients when they engage in these practices, and include other care providers for deeper processing if necessary.” In her sessions, Kreatsoulas helps clients develop coping tools, practice centering and breathing exercises, gently move their bodies, explore yoga philosophy, and set goals to promote healing.

Plus, some therapists and dietitians who are also yoga teachers offer yoga-infused therapy or nutrition sessions, combining traditional therapy and nutrition counseling with yoga practices on an individualized basis. “This means focusing on the other aspects of yoga, such as meditation and breathwork, in addition to the ethical principles of yoga,” explains psychotherapist Amanda Marks, LPC, CPCS. In my practice, I offer clients the option to practice yoga in various forms within sessions, with the intention to help them nonjudgmentally observe thoughts and reconnect to the present moment, their bodies, and their emotions.

Regular yoga classes, on the other hand, are typically focused on the physical practice of yoga, and tend to follow specific styles. The different styles of yoga you might see include:

Yin yoga: emphasizes long-held floor postures and deep stretching
Restorative yoga: includes long-held floor postures for relaxation, typically with props like blankets, bolsters or pillows, and blocks
Hatha yoga: emphasizes floor and standing postures at a slow pace with focus on the breath
Vinyasa yoga: includes continuous movement and flowing through poses, matching breath to movement at a swift pace
Power yoga: includes strength-based poses and fiery sequences
Gentle yoga: emphasizes mindful, slow, and soft movement

Potential risks of practicing yoga in recovery

While yoga can be a powerful tool in recovery, it can also do harm if not practiced mindfully. There are a few particular areas of caution to keep in mind, outlined below.

Much of the yoga industry is steeped in diet culture.

I’ll never forget being in the middle of a yoga practice when the teacher started talking about how “bad” she had eaten over the weekend, naming specific foods and expressing her guilt about it. While I was firmly rooted in my recovery at that point and so was more annoyed than triggered, such comments can be significantly harmful to recovery. They also take us away from yoga’s roots—as mentioned above, yoga is so much more than a physical practice, and the physical practice is not about burning calories, earning food, or chasing a certain body aesthetic. “Unfortunately, in our appearance-obsessed world, yoga studios are not exempt from being influenced by diet culture,” Degener says. “There have been times where I've been in classes and heard remarks about certain poses changing our appearance or needing to push through pain to ‘feel the burn.’”

Other red flags include studios that promote restriction of any kind, like detoxes or juice cleanses, or that don’t celebrate body diversity among teachers and idolize thinness within marketing photography. “Like many aspects of wellness today, yoga has been swept along with social media, promoting the stereotype of a particular body type,” Kreatsoulas adds. “The yoga selfie craze can breed body comparison, and the hyper-focus on yoga as fitness can inadvertently prompt competition, overexertion, and perfectionism.”

Yoga can become part of the eating disorder.

Exercising obsessively or punitively is common in eating disorders, and yoga can easily become wrapped up in such behaviors, especially since what Kreatsoulas calls “workout yoga” is idealized in our culture. “High-intensity, fitness-focused classes, and workshops often reinforce unhealthy drives, such as over-exercising and focusing on weight loss to change one’s body to fit an ideal,” she says. “These messages can be counterproductive to the values of acceptance, self-care, and self-love inherent to both the true heart of yoga and the recovery process.”

Being a “yogi” or devoted yoga student can sometimes become a facade behind which eating disorders hide. In fact, even the non-physical aspects of yoga, like the suggested tools for cultivating happiness and confidence, can be misused by the eating disorder brain. For example, one yoga-based suggestion is practicing purity or cleanliness on and off the yoga mat—and while this is meant to encourage healthy practices like keeping clean living spaces, the eating disorder can warp it to be about only eating certain foods, or fasting. When I work with clients to develop a yoga practice in their recovery, we always discuss the “why” behind the types of practices they choose and how they integrate yoga into their lives (on and off the mat) to ensure they’re using yoga to help them live in recovery—not stay imprisoned in their eating disorders.

The physical practice requires medical stability.

Like with any other physical activity, it’s critical to ensure you’re healthy enough to exercise before you start a physical yoga practice, since exerting yourself while medically compromised is dangerous. In a 2021 study that explored eating disorder clinicians’ perspectives on yoga, they agreed that higher intensity practices (like power yoga and yoga done in hot studios) can be especially detrimental and even dangerous to people with eating disorders who are early on in recovery or medically unstable (or both), and that more research should be done on the risks of practicing physical yoga in recovery. Despite all of yoga’s potential benefits, it’s not always going to be healthy or helpful for every person in eating disorder recovery, and those who aren’t yet medically stable fall into that category.

When to incorporate yoga in eating disorder recovery

Depending on which aspects of yoga are used, it can often be incorporated at any point in recovery, even early on. For example, while you may not be ready for physical poses, you can start to integrate non-physical yogic practices into your life, like self-study, breathing techniques, and meditation. Or perhaps you start a physical practice with one restorative posture, like legs up the wall—all of it “counts” as yoga.

“What is most important is that you're staying connected to your unique needs,” Deneger says. “I always come back to what my teachers taught me: if you’re breathing, and if you’re practicing being in the moment, it doesn't matter whether you're in child's pose the entire class—you're practicing yoga.”

Supporting this approach is one 2024 study of women with eating disorders, which showed that practicing gentle yoga can be a safe way to incorporate healthy movement and experience the body compassionately at all stages of recovery—even at the inpatient level of care. However, physical practices of any level should be guided by your healthcare provider or treatment team to create a medically and mentally safe plan that hopefully supports and ideally enhances your recovery. “There are many different styles of classes that have varying levels of physical intensity,” Degener adds, “and a provider who knows your physical needs can help you determine what would be a good fit for you, and when.”

How those in recovery can start yoga safely

Clearly, there’s a lot to consider when starting a yoga practice in recovery. While the most important thing is to collaborate with your treatment team, here are some other factors to consider when you’re getting started:

Look for trauma-informed teachers. Being trauma-informed generally means that teachers are aware of students with trauma (which is common among those with eating disorders) and trained to safely help them become more connected to what’s happening in their bodies. It also means they give their students choice and avoid potentially triggering positions and language.
Look for studios and teachers who focus on yoga holistically. Some facilities or online teachers or schools offer meditation, breathing, and yogic philosophy classes. More commonly, some teachers will infuse such elements into physical practices. “It’s okay to take your time finding a space that you feel comfortable in and that respects the entirety of the practice rather than only focusing on the physical elements,” Degener adds.
Stay aware of diet culture. While it can take time to find authentic yoga sources that are free of diet culture and in alignment with eating disorder recovery, it’s possible to find safe spaces and teachers. Marks suggests looking for yoga therapists and teachers who have “a non-diet mentality and are weight- and body-neutral and accepting and encouraging of all body sizes.” Marks also recommends asking your therapist or dietitian for referrals, as well as“searching social media for fat or plus size yoga teachers, because they will focus on making yoga accessible and safe for almost everybody.”
Do your research. Whether you’re looking to practice yoga online or in person, it may take some trial and error to find the right fit for you. “I would strongly encourage folks to research studios in their area and consider reaching out to ask them about their philosophy as a studio and how they approach their teaching,” Degener encourages. “Personally, I feel most at home in studios that don't prominently feature mirrors, have teachers that discuss yogic philosophy in addition to the physical practice, and offer many variations or options for modification throughout the class.”
Start gentle. If you’re physically and mentally ready to start a physical yoga practice in eating disorder recovery, Kreatsoulas recommends “choosing classes that are gentle, for beginners, or restorative in nature.” This recommendation remains true whether or not you’re actually a beginner in yoga. Over time, if it’s supportive of your recovery, you may explore other, more physically demanding, types of yoga, with the support and guidance of your healthcare team..

Finally, here are some communities and books that can support your yoga journey: