Hello. You may have reached this page because a patient/client of yours is considering, or has begun, recovery coaching with me for their eating-, exercise-, or body-related difficulties.
If so, please be assured that my coaching service is not envisaged as a replacement to the support you provide, and that I’m keen to work with you to achieve the best possible outcome for your patient/client.
I hope that the Q&A I put together here may answer many of your questions about what I offer. A little more information on my credentials may be helpful, though.
I am a coach accredited by the European Mentoring & Coaching Council at Senior Practitioner level. I’m also a researcher based at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a background in cognitive literary studies and health humanities. You can find a list of all my publications (mostly academic) here, and more details on my mental health-related research activities and publications here. This includes my primary current research focus, the potential benefits (and dangers) of “bibliotherapy” for eating disorders, a project which began life as a collaboration with the UK eating disorder charity Beat. I have also published a paper in Frontiers in Psychology arguing for a behavioural focus in support for eating disorder recovery. It’s entitled “Treating eating: A dynamical systems theory of eating disorders”, and you can find it open-access here.
As I explain in the FAQs, my Psychology Today blog A Hunger Artist (see also a themed [rather than chronological] list of posts here) was the main motivation to me in setting up this coaching service. Before Psychology Today removed comments from all blogs in 2021, readers contacted me on a near-daily basis asking for advice with the practicalities of their recovery—and indeed for advice on how to take the plunge and commit to recovery at all. My 2014 post “Recovering from anorexia: How and why not to stop halfway” was one that really touched a nerve with readers. It elicited more comments (sadly now removed from the public site) than any other, because making initial progress in recovery but then getting stuck—somewhere beyond the clinical danger zone but far short of true freedom from disordered thoughts, feelings, and behaviours—is clearly a common experience. Getting stuck halfway is one of the primary situations my coaching is designed to address. As such, coaching complements rather than replacing the more intensive support many people may have accessed earlier on in recovery.
Recovery coaching is a way to provide help with a pragmatic focus and an emphasis on trusting and enhancing the client’s personal agency that are often a valuable complement to therapeutic and medical forms of support. My view is that acknowledgement of the psychological realities that make behavioural change difficult is crucial, but that ultimately, if behaviours and hence bodily state remain the same, nothing else can ever truly change. The coaching I offer attempts to do justice to the powerful interactions between physical, behavioural, cognitive, and emotional realities, in order to help the person I’m working with live happily, healthily, and freely.
Please get in touch at emily [at] hungerartist.org or via the contact form on this site if you have any questions or concerns; I’ll be happy to talk by email or set up a Zoom call. Meanwhile thanks for your interest in what I do.
Emily Troscianko