Yes. BED isn’t a lack of willpower, it’s a diagnosable eating disorder that is completely treatable with the right, professional care. The earlier you get support, the easier it is to get ahead of the condition and recover, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re concerned.
Our stance on GLP-1s aligns with our overall stance on weight loss: we are committed to providing you with clinical information to support your decision-making, but we take a non-judgmental stance toward GLP-1s and will neither encourage nor discourage your use of these medications.
While we don’t recommend or prescribe GLP-1 medications at Equip, we frequently work with patients who are currently taking or plan to start taking a GLP-1, and have protocols in place to best support this population. Your care team can help you explore your reasons for taking these medications and walk through what the latest evidence suggests about how they might affect your eating disorder.
If you find that these medications are hindering your eating disorder recovery, we can partner with your prescribing provider to help you stop taking these medications. Long-term eating disorder recovery will always be our primary focus.
Our program is designed to help you achieve lasting eating disorder recovery. We will be focused on improvements that aren’t related to the scale, like stopping binge episodes, improved mood, or less food noise. As you make progress toward recovery, there are often improvements in physical and mental health.
No. When assessing progress or success in treatment, we look at things like reduction in binge eating episodes, an improved relationship with food, better quality of life, and reduced food noise, among other metrics.
Often, the main reason a person experiences food noise is because they’re restricting food in some way. For a lot of people with binge eating disorder, this looks like constant dieting, rigid rules about “good” and “bad” foods, cutting out entire food groups, or restricting food during the day. Once you start eating consistently, which your Equip dietitian will help you do, it’s common for the food noise to significantly lessen.
Sometimes, there are other causes of food noise. It can be an emotional coping tool, for instance, or an anxiety response. This is something you can work through with your Equip therapist.
Each person has a unique response to eating disorder treatment. Across Equip patients with binge eating disorder, about one third gain weight, one third lose weight, and one third see no change in weight. We can’t predict how your body will respond because each body’s needs are different.
We do not focus on weight; we focus on eating disorder recovery, which means looking at metrics like symptoms and behaviors. If you gain weight during treatment and it causes distress, your team will be there to help you unpack and manage those feelings and help you find a path forward.
It’s not uncommon to start treatment with a goal of losing weight—but your Equip team is here to help you with eating disorder recovery, and this doesn’t include pursuing weight loss. One of the reasons we don’t work on weight loss during eating disorder treatment is that dieting is known to worsen eating disorder behaviors, including binge eating. We aim to set you up for long-term success and help you stop binge eating for good by changing your thoughts, emotions, and eating behaviors.
Your team will work with you to explore your motivation for seeking weight loss, and what more recovery-oriented goals might look like. But you don’t have to give up your weight loss goals to get treatment at Equip.
As part of Equip treatment, your dietitian will create a personalized meal plan to help you normalize your eating patterns. The meal plan is meant to address disordered eating behaviors, not lead to weight loss. Meal plans look different from person to person, and you’ll work together to build one that fits your lifestyle and supports your recovery goals.
