We tailor treatment to each patient’s unique needs by using a variety of evidence-based treatment approaches.

Here’s a simple breakdown of the evidence-based approaches we most frequently use:

• Family-based treatment (FBT): FBT is based on the idea that family members are best suited to help their loved one recover. Research shows that for children and adolescents with eating disorders, FBT has the highest rates of recovery and the lowest rates of relapse.
• Enhanced cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT-E): CBT-E focuses on challenging unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that keep an eating disorder going.
• Cognitive behavioral therapy for ARFID (CBT-AR): CBT-AR uses personalized strategies to address patients' unique ARFID symptoms, including sensory sensitivities, food-related fears, and lack of interest or poor appetite.
• Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT): DBT provides tools to help people regulate and cope with difficult emotions.
• Temperament-based therapy with supports (TBT-S): TBT-S helps patients understand how their temperament traits (e.g. perfectionism, impulsivity, and determination) may contribute to their eating disorder symptoms, and how they can channel these traits into building a life outside of the eating disorder.
• Exposure and response prevention (ERP): ERP focuses on helping people face their fears and triggers. These may include specific fear foods or social situations that contribute to eating disorder behaviors.

You can learn more about Equip’s treatment approaches here.

Equip uses the leading, evidence-based treatment modalities that are proven to be effective in treating eating disorders. Research shows that these methods are just as effectively delivered virtually as in-person treatment. Our team educates and supports you every step of the way, empowering you with the skills to monitor weights and vitals at home, as well as prepare and plate all food.

Virtual treatment also has many added benefits. It allows for flexible scheduling, integrates family and friends into the recovery process, and lets patients develop coping skills in their real life, leading to lasting recovery and relapse prevention.

Once you or your loved one has reached medical stability, Equip is an effective alternative for patients across a wide spectrum of acuity levels, including those who might otherwise seek residential, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, or traditional outpatient treatment.

The reality is that effective treatment does take time. But unlike in-person care, which requires you to put life on pause, virtual treatment lets you attend sessions when and where it works for you.

Equip patients fit treatment into their lives in many different ways. While many people take their sessions from home, we also have students joining from a teacher’s office at school, working adults dialing in from a break room, even patients attending appointments from a parking lot.

The initial two weeks of treatment are relatively intense in terms of the number of appointments, but after that, your provider team will work with you to schedule sessions at times that your busy life can accommodate.

There is no waitlist for Equip, so treatment can start on a timeline that works for you. For some patients, medical clearance is needed before treatment can begin. Your admissions specialist will coordinate your start date with you, and review the steps to complete before your first session. Learn more about the admissions process here.

Our founders created Equip’s comprehensive treatment model to fill the gaps they’d seen in existing care. Drawing on their combined decades of clinical and lived experience, they designed Equip to deliver the most effective components of evidence-based treatment to patients and their support networks at home, where skills can be applied directly to everyday life. Equip also incorporates additional elements like mentors with lived experience and support groups to promote lasting recovery.

While we believe that involvement from supportive people around you can be helpful in recovery, we don’t require family or other supports to be part of the process. You can also start on your own, then work with your team to identify who might be a good support and determine the best way to involve them in treatment.

Equip is in-network with most major insurance plans, and you can check your coverage with our insurance screener. Our team will also verify your insurance information before you start at Equip to make sure we are in-network for your insurance and review how your plan coverage will impact any cost share (copays or coinsurance) you may be responsible for. If Equip is not in-network with your insurance, we offer a private pay option. A financial counselor will work with you directly to review costs and options such as HSA/FSA eligibility.

If you’re concerned your loved one may have an eating disorder, approach the conversation from a place of curiosity and compassion. Eating disorders are secretive illnesses and are often accompanied by feelings of shame. It’s important to avoid accusations or any implication they may be doing something “wrong.”

It’s often best to begin by asking an open-ended question, like, “I’ve noticed you haven't been at family dinners recently. Why do you think that is?” Don’t be discouraged if your first attempt at a conversation doesn’t unfold perfectly. Eating disorders work hard to protect themselves; continue to approach future conversations in the same way.

Learn more about how to talk to a loved one with an eating disorder on our blog.

When the body is malnourished, the brain is, too. This is true of all eating disorder patients. A malnourished brain doesn’t think clearly or take in new information well. People who are malnourished are more likely to be depressed, anxious, and have trouble paying attention. Evidence shows that individual therapy isn’t effective in the early stages of eating disorder recovery when a patient is malnourished.

Because of this, the first step in Equip treatment is to normalize eating habits, restore nutrition, and gain weight (if needed). Then, we can shift the focus to individual therapy, using evidence-based interventions like DBT, CBT-E, exposure therapy, and others. As eating disorder symptoms improve and disappear, we can also shift the focus of therapy to other conditions the patient may have, like OCD, anxiety, and depression.

Throughout their time with Equip, patients also have access to groups and mentorship for ongoing validation, connection, and support.

Length of treatment varies from patient to patient, but the average patient in remission discharges after 51 weeks. This may sound long, but the length of treatment is specifically designed to prevent relapse, which is so common for these illnesses. Additionally, since patients go through treatment from home, treatment doesn’t impede their lives or the lives of their loved ones, and many of our insurance partners provide coverage for at least a year.

Generally, treatment begins as a high-touch process with several appointments per week, and gradually becomes a lower-touch experience as each patient moves through their treatment journey and toward recovery.

During the intake appointment with their Equip dietitian, patients and their supports receive a personalized recommendation around weight goals and monitoring. For young patients who need to gain weight, this generally means twice-weekly closed weights (formerly known as blind weights) at home. For adult patients, the decision to do open or closed weighing is decided on an individual basis, taking into account their treatment plan and preferences. All adult patients have the option of receiving a BodyTrace scale which enables at-home weight measuring without seeing the numbers, and sends data directly and discreetly to the patient's care team.

While weights are shared openly with parents and caregivers, we work with families to make a collaborative decision about whether it would be constructive to share weight numbers with younger patients. We also create a plan to cope with thoughts, emotions, or urges that may come up during weighing or conversations about weight.

We follow the American Psychiatric Association Practice Guidelines and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine factors to support hospitalization to determine if a patient may need to be hospitalized for medical stabilization. From the very outset, an Equip medical provider will work in conjunction with your outside primary care provider to determine medical status and coordinate hospitalization if it’s needed.

If you or your loved one does need inpatient stabilization, your Equip team will continue to coordinate with outside providers throughout hospitalization. This ensures that when it’s time for discharge, patients can seamlessly transition from inpatient hospitalization back into our care.

Our provider team includes trained and licensed therapists, medical providers, and dietitians, all of whom specialize in eating disorders, as well as certified mentors for both the patient and the people supporting them.

Every therapist is licensed (with licenses such as LCSW, LMFT, AMFT, and others) and has training in eating disorder treatment. Therapists undergo approximately 80 hours of training and supervision in their first three months at Equip. Our medical providers are MDs (physicians, pediatricians, or psychiatrists), registered nurses, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners with training in eating disorders. Medical providers complete 30 hours of training when onboarding with Equip, and nurses complete 50 hours of training. Every dietitian has been licensed as an RD and has experience working with patients with eating disorders. They complete 30 hours of training.

Our mentors are Equip employees who either have lived experience with an eating disorder (meaning they have recovered from an eating disorder themselves) or have helped a loved one recover from an eating disorder. Mentors also receive over 30 hours of specialized mentorship training through Equip.

All Equip providers receive ongoing training and supervision, including 24 hours of continuing education.

You can take this free screener to get a sense of how at risk you or your loved one may be of an eating disorder and better understand the key signs. If the screener indicates that you or your loved one are at risk, or if you’re still worried regardless, we recommend getting a professional consultation. You can reach out to your primary care physician, or schedule a free consultation with Equip.

Who attends appointments depends on a few factors, including the age of the patient and which loved ones will be involved in treatment.

Certain appointments, like peer mentor sessions, are for the patient alone, while family mentor sessions are just for loved ones. For young patients doing family-based treatment (FBT), family members will be involved in more sessions, whereas older patients and those not doing FBT may have more solo appointments.

We encourage you to “bring your village” to treatment, because we know that doing so improves odds of lasting recovery. But we also know that looks different for each person, and we’ll work with you to find a balance that feels right.