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If you’re wading through eating disorder treatment options for yourself or a loved one and have become overwhelmed with all the different types, you’re not alone. What’s an IOP and what’s a PHP? Where does virtual care fit in and how does it work? These might be some of the questions racing through your mind.

Take a deep breath and exhale. The two key things to know right away is that care is available and that you 

 have options when considering the type that’s best for you or a family member.

To unpack it all, think of levels of care for eating disorders as a continuum. The spectrum ranges from care on an outpatient basis (once a week or more) to around-the-clock care with inpatient hospitalization (which usually lasts for a few days or weeks).

eating disorder care is not one-size-fits all

. What’s right for your circumstances may not be right for someone else. People often progress between levels of care as circumstances or needs change.

In this article, we explore the different levels of care for eating disorders and how they operate. We’ll help you determine what level of care is right for you or your loved one based on individual factors.

What are the levels of care for eating disorders?

 include outpatient options (virtual and/or in person), an intensive outpatient program (IOP), a partial hospitalization program (PHP), residential treatment, and inpatient hospitalization.

Think of these levels of care as existing on a continuum rather than as strict categories. You might even picture a staircase where you can either “step up” or “step down” in care as needed.

“Eating disorder treatment should be tailored to meet patient and family needs,” says 

, the supervising psychiatrist at Equip Health.

“Now, that doesn’t mean just anything will work,” she adds. “It is important that people seek treatment rooted in evidence-based practices. But we also know eating disorder recovery will not work if it does not fit into someone’s life. This means that treatment can vary from person to person.”

Patients who are medically stable and need flexibility

 for eating disorders is best for patients who are medically stable. This means you or your loved one is not currently at risk for malnutrition or serious physical or mental health complications.

Outpatient treatment options typically include one-on-one sessions with a mental health professional. And you or a loved one might have occasional additional sessions with a registered dietitian and a medical provider.

Treatment may occur in person or virtually through video conferencing or other methods.

At home, attending various sessions throughout the week

More structured than regular outpatient treatment but still flexible

Patients who need a higher level of care than can be provided with weekly sessions but who need flexibility

You or your loved one might need a more intensive and structured form of outpatient care. An IOP includes the same elements as a regular outpatient program. But rather than solely meeting with individual providers, you’ll experience more of a coordinated care approach. This type of care integrates other elements such as meals and/or support groups.

IOPs can be built around attending school or going to work. And they can be done virtually or in person.

Patients who need more extensive care than what can be achieved with regular outpatient or IOP care but who are stabilized enough to live at home

The term “partial hospitalization program” for eating disorders can be a bit misleading because it doesn’t involve overnight stays, and the program typically doesn’t take place in a hospital. Instead, care might be received in another type of in-person setting or even virtually.

PHPs for eating disorders are day programs. You or a loved one will spend about six to 10 hours a day receiving care on five to six days per week. Care typically includes individual and group therapy, meal support, and more.

You can complete a PHP in person or virtually. However, because of the time commitment, you or a loved one won’t be able to attend school or work.

Patients who need around-the-clock care and monitoring but who are medically stable

Live-in treatment ranges from residential care for eating disorders to 

. A live-in setting might be right for you or a loved one if an outpatient program or PHP doesn’t provide enough structure. This might be the case if eating disorder behaviors, such as restriction, bingeing, compulsive exercise, etc., are still present and affecting everyday life.

Residential treatment for eating disorders requires ongoing overnight stays in a treatment center or a smaller facility such as a group home. There, you or a loved one will receive ongoing care, including meals, individual and group therapy, and more.

Working during a residential stay isn’t possible. However, some online learning may be feasible.

Patients who meet eating disorder hospitalization criteria because of their need for medical stabilization, psychiatric care, or both—around the clock.

Inpatient hospitalization occurs in a hospital setting to offer close care and support for you or a loved one. It may involve:

Eating disorders can lead to severe health concerns, such as complications from malnutrition or purging. Medical stabilization, including renourishment, may be necessary as a first course of action in eating disorder recovery.

Eating disorders are associated with psychiatric risks, including self-harm. Ongoing psychiatric care and monitoring may be necessary as a safety precaution.

Inpatient eating disorder medical-psychiatric hospitalization: 

Some hospital systems have specialized units where you or a loved one can receive both medical stabilization and psychiatric care.

The following table shows how the levels of care stack up, starting with the least structured and least time-intensive to the most structured.

How do you know what level of care you or your loved one may need?

You don’t have to make the decision alone on the type of care needed for you or a loved one. Instead, a medical or mental health clinician can help you decide or guide you in the right direction.

“Recommendations will depend on several factors,” says Dr. Kessel, “such as the severity of your illness; your level of support; your geographic location; your ability to take time away from work, school or family; and what your insurance covers.”

Eating disorder care has also come a long way in the past few decades, offering more flexibility.

“Previously, people seeking comprehensive eating disorder treatment with a unified team had to go to residential facilities or partial hospitalization programs,” Dr. Kessel says. “Now, thanks to innovation and the advent of telehealth services, people can get quality eating disorder treatment wherever they have an internet connection.”

Virtual care will not be right for everyone, depending on factors, such as medical stability, family structure, and co-occurring conditions. But it could be part of a long-term care plan after medical or psychiatric stabilization.

What does it mean to “step up” or “step down” in care?

Treating the Individual: Moving towards Personalised Eating Disorder Care

The Role of Higher Levels of Care for Eating Disorders in Youth

Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America

, Eating Disorders in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 28, no. 4, Oct. 2019, pp. 573–82.

The Hybrid Space in Eating Disorder Treatment: Towards a Personalized Approach to Integrating Telehealth and in-Person Care

What Are the Different Levels of Care for Eating Disorders?

Social media's impact on how people feel about their bodies has been well documented, but what’s been harder to quantify is its scale. New research from Equip surveyed more than 800 adults to find out exactly what people encounter online, how it affects them, and what happens when they try to push back.

Here's what we learned, and what it means for everyone navigating this complex digital environment.

Nearly 70% of respondents encountered social media content promoting dieting, restriction, body checking, or disordered eating in the past year, without ever looking for it. Only 8% sought it out.

When people tried to change what they were seeing, the algorithm often made things worse. Among respondents who actively sought out body-positive or recovery-focused content, 42% were subsequently served more fitness and body transformation content, and 33% received more restriction-focused 

Trying to opt out of harmful content functioned as a signal to serve more of it.

For people in eating disorder recovery, this dynamic can be dangerous. Recovery requires building a healthier relationship with food, movement, and body image—a process that becomes significantly harder when the platform you're on is actively working against you.

“It's definitely triggering to see that, it reminds me of my past struggles when I had an eating disorder, and it makes me feel pressured to look a certain way to be accepted or considered attractive. It triggers thoughts that I don't want to think about. It does increase my anxiety and depression around my weight and appearance, and it just makes me feel worse about my body. It reinforces unrealistic societal standards and has the potential to push me towards extreme behaviors.” -39-year-old woman

“These influencers reminded me of my previous eating disorder/disordered eating days when I was younger, like in my teens and 20s. It's taken so much internal work to undo all of the toxicity around women's bodies that I was exposed to when I was growing up, and watching influencer content like that takes me back to those days.” -37-year-old woman

Women bear a disproportionate share of the harm

The data breaks down sharply by gender. Nearly 75% of women encountered harmful body image content unsolicited, compared to about two-thirds of men. Women were more likely to encounter it frequently, more likely to feel worse about their appearance afterward, and nearly twice as likely as men to report a negative emotional impact. Among women whose behavior was affected, skipping meals was a significantly more common response than among men.

Open-ended responses added an important dimension to this picture. 

 described expecting body image pressure to ease with age, and finding social media amplified it instead. The moments when they were most vulnerable—including 

 perimenopause, and midlife physical transition—were exactly when harmful content hit hardest. 

This isn't incidental. Nearly 1 in 3 women 

develop disordered eating for the first time in midlife

, according to Equip's data, and the content environment they're navigating is making that worse.

“I was feeling somewhat ok about my body, but the constant focus on appearance makes me more critical of how I look. Every time I'm on any social app, I see tons of Zepbound, Ozempic, & Wegovy ads as well as 'fitness' posts with super fit people in very little clothing. It makes me less confident.” -56-year-old woman

“I work very hard to retain a positive self-image. But when I am bombarded with this sort of stuff every single day, I cannot help a little bit of it seeping into my subconscious. So then I spend days/weeks fighting it back off. The pressure to appear perfect is astounding. And the connotation surrounding having any flaws in appearance at all is absolutely devastating to how I feel about myself.” -56-year-old woman

“As a 52-year-old female who is going through 

 (a HUGE body change!), I am astonished by how many videos are on IG and TikTok showing off women over 50 who have ‘perfect' bodies. They eat 100s of grams of protein per day, work out daily, lift heavy weights, etc. Or they just show off amazing outfits. This is totally unrealistic compared to the bodies of all my 50+ yo friends, and I feel tremendous guilt and shame watching these videos. It often spurs my friends and me to skip meals, overexercise (sometimes to the point of injury), or try silly new apps or wearable devices. It's so depressing and unrealistic. I thought the body image pressure would lessen after we turned 50yo — but I was wrong.” -52-year-old woman

Men are affected too—but they may be unaware

More than two-thirds of men said they've never felt triggered or distressed by harmful body image content on social media. But the behavioral data tells a different story.

Among men who reported that their thoughts or behaviors were actually affected by what they saw, more than half compared their bodies to others online. Men were also significantly more likely than women to increase compensatory exercise after exposure to harmful content. The harm is present. It just doesn't look like what we've been taught to recognize as harm.

Men are also encountering a distinct content ecosystem. Where women are more likely to see 

 and weight-loss medication posts, men are more likely to encounter bulking and cutting content, material that frames disordered behavior as discipline, ambition, or self-improvement. This framing makes it far harder for men to identify what's happening to them, and far less likely that they'll seek help.

“The fitness and diet advertisements on Instagram made me constantly compare my body to influencers and feel pressured to achieve their physique through strict eating and exercise routines.” -20–year-old man

 “Although I don't pay attention to ads and generally take a very dim view of diet culture and weight loss ads, I do find that it's hard sometimes to completely ignore people who present as 'very fit' on social media. I find that it makes me a bit uncomfortable at times, and I have to talk to others or check in with myself to make sure I'm not buying into negative stereotypes.” -40-year-old man

“It constantly shows unrealistically thin or in shape people & makes exaggerated claims about diet & exercise. Even though I know I look okay, constantly being exposed to this gets to me a little, it makes me defensive about my body even though it's realistically fine, and I might exercise a bit more or diet more than I should to compensate.” -55-year-old man

It isn't just organic content driving this harm. Nearly 80% of respondents reported being served paid advertisements or influencer content related to weight loss, dieting, fitness, or body transformation. Of those, 28% said it increased their anxiety about weight or appearance, and 28% felt direct pressure to change their body.

Women again reported more negative impacts from paid content than men. But one finding cut across gender lines: GLP-1 and Ozempic ads were named unprompted by dozens of respondents as a distinct source of distress. Several people in eating disorder recovery described the current weight loss drug moment as a regression, a pressure to pursue thinness they thought they had left behind. When advertising for weight loss medications floods social media feeds at scale, the people most vulnerable to that messaging are often the ones with the least protection against it.

“I remember seeing an ad for a weight loss injection recently (within the past week or so). It gave me this feeling of "I might need this product if I'm going to have the 'right look' to fit the current social standard for how bodies are 'supposed to' look." I was able to think about it more objectively once that feeling passed, but it was very concerning to me that I had that type of reaction to the ad.” - 34-year-old woman

“I had a really bad eating disorder in my teens, and seeing these grown women looking like they had the body of a 19-year-old triggered thoughts about how I no longer look young in weight.” - 28-year-old woman

Social media platforms have the technical capacity to identify and limit harmful content. The fact that recovery-seeking behavior triggers more harmful content reflects how recommendation systems are designed and what they optimize for. Meaningful platform accountability would require platforms to treat body image harm with the same seriousness they apply to other categories of harmful content.

For everyone navigating this environment, awareness matters. Recognizing that what appears in your feed is not random and that the discomfort or behavioral change you notice after scrolling may be connected to what you're being served is a first step.

If you've noticed that social media is having a negative effect on your body image or overall mental health, it may be time to take a break, or mute or block certain accounts. If you're concerned about how social media might be impacting your child, 

these expert-endorsed strategies can help

New Research: What Social Media Is Actually Doing to How We Think about our Bodies

When I worked in a child and adolescent eating disorder hospital, I had the opportunity to be part of many patients’ treatment teams, alongside a doctor, therapist, psychiatrist, and parents. I witnessed parents’ pain, stress, and fear, as well as their unwavering love and hope for their child to be free from the prison that was their eating disorder. After working with countless families, I saw a trend—kids whose parents who had healthy relationships to food, body, and exercise often seemed to have the best chance at recovery. However, kids whose parents held unhealthy food beliefs and behaviors were also able to experience recovery success—if they became aware of and were willing to shift their attitudes.

“If you use the experience to ensure the whole family moves forward in a more holistically healthy way when it comes to food and movement, you will have gained something that will improve everyone’s life going forward,” says JD Ouellette, Director of Lived Experience at Equip.

Today, let’s look at how parents’ relationship to food impacts their child’s eating, as well as expert-backed ways to best align your food relationship with your child’s long-term recovery.

How parents’ eating habits impact their kids

Kids often observe their parents and how they interact with other people and the world around them, which includes their relationships to food. According to a 

 of studies about parents and kids ages two to 13, there’s a strong association between parents’ food practices and how their kids eat.

“Children internalize not just what parents feed them, but how parents relate to food, bodies, and eating,” says eating disorder therapist 

. “Parents and caregivers are the relational anchors within the child’s eating environment.”

She says when parents demonstrate healthy food relationships and 

), their kids are more likely to self-regulate and trust themselves and their bodies. Some traits of eating competence and 

Relative structure around meals and snacks

Food takes up a relatively small amount of brain space

“When parents embody these capacities, they offer children a lived experience of eating that is grounded in trust, predictability, and flexibility,” Oseroff explains. However, when parents have disordered relationships to food, children will often internalize their feelings, attitudes, and behaviors. Some signs of unhealthy food relationships include:

Moralizing language (“good” and “bad” foods)

 of a diverse group of parents and teenagers, there’s a link between parents’ restrictive feeding practices and lower 

“If eating cake is bad when mom or dad does it, and the child enjoys cake, does it make them a bad person? Kids absolutely have these thoughts,” Ouellette says. "And if maintaining a strict diet or specific low weight takes center stage in life for parents, kids notice this as well.”

If you’re realizing your relationship with food might be negatively impacting your child, don’t blame yourself. Remember that 

 infiltrates every area of our lives—it’s in our schools, workplaces, gyms, and healthcare spaces—and its conditioning runs deep. But it’s never too late to start building awareness of your own relationship to food and consider how it might impact your child.

Why your relationship with food matters during your child’s eating disorder recovery

When a child has an eating disorder, they’re relearning how to eat and how to relate to food and their bodies, so how parents relate to food is more important than ever.

“The eating environment either supports restoration of internal regulation or reinforces external control and rigidity,” Oseroff says.

, parents’ roles include taking full control of eating—planning, preparing, and supervising. In my practice, we explain to families that when parents or loved ones are modeling healthy food behaviors at the table with the person who has an eating disorder, it’s an external, helpful, and opposing force to their eating disorder brain.

“When caregivers have eating attitudes and behaviors that align with treatment goals, like variety, balance, no forbidden foods, and eventually intuitive eating, it positively impacts their child’s recovery,” explains 

intuitive eating dietitian Meaghan Ormsby, MS, RDN

However, when parents or loved ones are restricting or using other unhealthy food or exercise behaviors, it’s like their eating disorder has an ally at the table.

“When they’re eating high-fat and energy-dense foods, on exercise restriction or reduction, and gaining weight, it’s not helpful for them to get verbal or non-verbal messaging that high-calorie foods, taking a break from their fitness routine, or weight gain are too scary for their parents to engage in,” Ouellette explains.

 of mostly female teens and young adults with eating disorders and their parents (mostly mothers), there’s a link between parents with 

 tendencies and increased eating disorder severity in the child. Another 

 of mostly female and white teens with eating disorders (mostly anorexia) showed that parental dieting behavior may impact teens’ responses to eating disorder treatment. Teens whose parents reported dieting had a slower weight gain and lower BMI at discharge when compared to participants whose parents weren’t dieting.

Here are some common, specific aspects of your relationship with food that can have a significant impact on your child’s recovery:

Using language rooted in diet culture, such as terms like “healthy” foods and “junk” foods, and comments related to weight, calories, or compensation (through exercise or restriction at other meals) will be detrimental to your child’s recovery. “Having a neutral, balanced approach to all foods helps children feel safer eating ‘fun foods, while labeling cookies or candy as ‘bad’ reinforces the eating disorder’s black-and-white thinking,” says 

pediatric dietitian, Emily McNally RD, LD

, who encourages parents to focus on how food and eating experiences provide nourishment, energy, and routine.

Even if you’re eating the same foods as your child and not using disordered language or behaviors around them, it’s possible they will pick up on underlying anxiety, tension, or distress about eating, according to McNally. On the other hand, a steady and matter-of-fact approach to meals and snacks is most helpful.

“If a parent encourages their child to eat a wide variety of foods but avoids those same foods themselves, the child notices. This can create confusion or mistrust,” McNally explains. Being flexible and including all types of foods without showing signs of guilt is most supportive of your child’s recovery.

“Parents can model eating a home-baked cookie the neighbor brought over even though they may not be hungry, missing a run in favor of watching a movie because it’s raining, and accepting gaining a few pounds by simply buying some new clothes,” Ouellette says. “If you don’t walk the walk, it makes it much harder for your child to recover fully from their eating disorder.”

How to align your food relationship with your child’s recovery

As a parent supporting a child through eating disorder treatment, your food behaviors and beliefs directly impact your child’s relationship to food and their recovery.

“When food and weight gain are life-saving measures, it’s vital that parents shift their attitudes and behaviors as well,” Ouellete explains. “Eating disorders have high mortality rates and low recovery rates, so kids need every support and chance to recover.”

 to make changes to better align your food relationship with your child’s healing. It can feel overwhelming to address your own issues and blind spots when dealing with their illness, so let’s explore manageable, expert-backed ways to feel more confident in helping your child heal.

Take stock of your food beliefs and behaviors

Take some time to be curious and compassionate with yourself about your relationship to food, as well as body and exercise.

“Parents are often navigating a delicate balance between supporting recovery and managing their own beliefs, histories, and anxieties around food,” Oseroff says.

This might include beliefs around thin bodies being “better” than non-thin bodies, certain foods being “bad” or “good,” or needing to “earn” food through exercise, among many others. I recommend getting curious about the origin of such beliefs. You can try asking yourself questions like:

When did this belief first take hold? How old was I?

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