Recovery coaching FAQs

What is recovery coaching?

Recovery coaching, as I practise it, is practical support designed to help my client towards full recovery from an eating disorder (formally diagnosed or not), or from problematic eating habits or attitudes around food, exercise, and/or their body. The point of my coaching practice is to help individuals bring their life’s reality closer to their ideals. The kind of help I offer is the kind that assumes that every individual knows what they want, and what they need, better than anyone else ever could—and also that this fundamental self-knowledge can get interfered with by illness, by stress, by busyness, by the way the world is. Coaching aims to help bring it back into focus.

What is recovery coaching not?

It is not counselling. It is not psychotherapy or cognitive behavioural therapy. It is not nutritional guidance or medical support. It is not about me giving advice. As a fundamentally anti-hierarchical process, coaching involves collaborative exploration, learning, and problem-solving, not one person presuming to tell another what to do with their life.

Who is recovery coaching for?

Recovery coaching may be for you if difficulties of any kind with eating or your body are preventing you from being happy or healthy. It may be for you if you have a past or present diagnosis of an eating disorder and have embarked on recovery, or if you’ve attempted recovery in the past but haven’t managed to recover fully. It may be for you if you can’t quite bring yourself, alone, to take the leap of faith (and evidence) required to commit to recovery and start acting differently in the first place. The services I offer are most directly targeted at restrictive eating disorders like anorexia, but I may also be able to help if you have problems with bingeing and purging (e.g. in bulimia) or overeating; there are no hard-and-fast divides between these different manifestations of eating problems. Coaching may also be for you if you don’t have an eating disorder but find that problems with food, exercise, and your body are preventing you from living the way you want to.

Who is coaching not for?

I do all I can to make the support I offer as relevant as possible to anyone who wants to be fully recovered from an eating disorder or other food-, exercise-, or body-related difficulties. However, I have to balance my desire to help with the risk of doing you harm, or delaying you in seeking more specialist support. If you are under 18, I can probably help you only if your parents and/or healthcare professionals are involved in your recovery too. If you are actively suicidal or have trauma-related problems or other physical health problems, I will likely also ask that you have additional professional support in dealing with that side of your experience alongside our coaching. If you suffer from the forms of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, obsessive-compulsive habits, and perfectionism that often accompany eating disorders, their severity will be a crucial consideration in whether I feel confident in working with you in absence of other professional input.

How are you qualified to be a recovery coach? 

I have no healthcare qualifications. I am qualified as a coach with the European Mentoring & Coaching Council at Senior Practitioner level. I have personal past experience of anorexia nervosa, which I suffered from between the ages of about 16 and 26. My recovery and post-recovery took a good few years, and there was no magic morning when I woke up and realized they were complete, but I would say that since around 2012 (four years after I started my final recovery effort) I have been fully recovered. My experience of illness and recovery will not have been the same as your experience, but it will not have been completely different either. I take your illness seriously (however clinically “severe” it has or has not been), and I believe in your capacity to recover fully.

I have a DPhil (PhD) in German literature from the University of Oxford. Since my PhD, which focused on the psychological effects of reading fiction (specifically mental imagery and emotional responses), my research has moved increasingly towards the intersection of literary studies, experimental psychology, and health, and my current work investigates the helpful and harmful potential of fiction-reading for eating disorders. Alongside my academic research, I have been running a Psychology Today blog on eating disorders, A Hunger Artist, since 2009. When I started the blog I had been recovering from anorexia for just over a year; I was fully weight-restored (with overshoot!) but psychologically still had a lot of work to do. Writing the blog (which has attracted over 4 million total views to date) involves reading extensively in eating disorder research, and drawing connections with research and writing in many other domains, as well as with what I learn as a coach. All this activity has taught me a vast amount about how eating difficulties arise, affect people’s lives, and are successfully overcome.

To support my professional development as a coach, and to ensure I practise ethically and effectively, I engage in regular coaching supervision with an accredited coaching supervisor. The European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) define supervision as follows:

Supervision is the interaction that occurs when a mentor or coach brings their coaching or mentoring work experiences to a supervisor to be supported and to engage in reflective dialogue and collaborative learning for the development and benefit of the mentor or coach, their clients and their organisations.

I find supervision and the associated learning an invaluable part of how I understand my relationships with my clients, the interventions I make, and the wider systems that shape the change my clients achieve. I also have monthly peer mentoring sessions with a GP who is also a health coach, in which we discuss the pragmatics of what we’ve learned as coaches in the past month and how we want to improve our coaching practices in the month ahead. And I do regular structured personal reflection on my own practice—for instance, after sessions or other interactions with clients where new insights or questions arise for me—with the aim of continuing to grow and improve as a coach.

The EMCC Global Code of Ethics offers a guiding framework for the standards I seek to attain and uphold as a coach. I seek to reflect its key principles in the coaching contract, privacy policy, and all online and other publicity materials in which I communicate my credentials, intentions, and practices as a coach. My aim is to enhance the reputation of coaching as a profession by working with integrity with clients, colleagues, mentors, trainers, and supervisors. The EMCC Diversity Statement acts as a reminder that the commonalities shared by all humans can easily be lost to view, and that holding them actively in mind is one way to help us all live in ways that are autonomous, peaceful, and responsible.

No less importantly, my privacy policy (version 1.11, February 2025) offers details on how I use and protect your data.

How does coaching work?

My coaching methods are designed, first, to give you the chance to attune yourself to your actual wants and needs; second, to help you design the strategies that will make those wants and needs a reality; and third, to help you implement those strategies and reflect on what changes, what you can learn, and what you want to do next. Whatever we are doing, I always start from the assumption that you are fundamentally resourceful; if you were not, coaching would not be the right form of work for you. And my intention is typically to make coaching itself gradually redundant, by building that resourcefulness systematically and efficiently until it becomes reliably self-sustaining.

To these ends, my practice is shaped by active listening, by open questioning, and by the primacy of translating learning (about the past) into informed action (in the present, for the future). I apply classic tried-and-tested coaching models inflected with context-specific elements invented or discovered through my many years of thinking and reading and learning about eating disorders—and about human beings.

Through a mixture of Zoom conversations, emails or shared-doc check-ins, and other structured kinds of contact, we establish together which aspects of your thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and physical state make most sense to tackle right now, and then we tackle them together, systematically, sensitively, and with a good dose of ruthlessness.

How individually tailored is the support?

My coaching methods start from specifics not generalities: their essence is careful identification of what the problem really is for you, and what a successful solution would look like. We then use the combination as a starting point for working out how you’re going to get from here to there. To help us both create as much clarity as possible, we’ll have an initial discovery call to start the exploration, and if we decide to go ahead and work together, I’ll ask you to complete a reflective exercise focused on your illness and recovery, including goal-setting in 3 crucial domains and at 3 interlocking timescales, before our first session. From then on, our coaching sessions will involved detailed conversations analysing the textures of your life and pinpointing precisely which interventions might stand the best chance of making real and sustainable change.

The format of our work, in terms of number and length of sessions and amount of contact in between sessions, is also something we’ll work out the basics of before we begin, and fine-tune as we learn more about how we work together. I draw no hard lines between your problems with eating and the rest of your life, so if we need to redefine the scope of our work to include other elements that you realize are crucial to fold in, we can do that.

Coaching also includes regular invitations to reflect on your progress and give feedback to me on how I’m supporting you. Finally, when you finish your work with me, we conclude with a constructive assessment of what you’ve achieved, and a roadmap for how you’ll be protecting and building on your progress in the months and years to come.

How do we get started?

If you’re interested in coaching, please get in touch via the contact form or by email and we can set a time for an initial 30-minute Zoom call (free of charge). After our call, if I’m confident I can help you, I create a coaching proposal after our call that summarizes what I think, based our conversation, we could usefully do together. If you decide that you want to go ahead, I then ask you to sign a binding contract that covers the terms of the coaching relationship, payment terms, and your consumer rights. I typically ask for full payment before we begin, but I’m happy to discuss payment plans if you prefer.

The discovery call, your reading of the coaching proposal and any email discussion we have about the details of our potential work, and the contract I’ll share with you before you make payment and we get started are all opportunities for you to make sure that this is a good fit for you. During this phase, if you have medical or other professional support, I also recommend that you inform your doctor/physician/therapist/counsellor that you are considering coaching. You may find it helpful to show them this document as well as the page “Recovery coaching: For professionals”. This will allow us to address any potential concerns or conflicts of interest, and to set up a constructively collaborative context in which your recovery can proceed efficiently.

You may cancel the programme up to 72 hours after our first session (not including the discovery call), in which case I will refund you the full fee minus a fee to cover the time I gave to the first session and creating your coaching plan. I do not offer refunds after this period, and I hope that you will challenge yourself and me to make the remaining time as beneficial for you as it can be.

How long does coaching take?

Recovery coaching is neither a magic bullet nor an endless exploration. The point of it is to equip you with tools and insights that will tangibly enhance your life in an efficient and effective way. Making this work requires effort, commitment, and honesty from both of us. Some improvements may be wonderfully rapid; others may need surprisingly (or predictably) sustained work. Typically, I will ask you to commit to an intensive four-week programme in the first instance, with the option to add extensions beyond that point. In general I find that clients work with me for between 3 and 9 months, usually starting with a higher intensity of contact before tapering towards less contact as their recovery progresses. I like to incorporate planned coaching breaks for any work longer than 3 months, as a way to find out what is now self–sustaining and what could do with more attention.

How does it end?

Coaching as I practise it has built-in obsolescence: I want you to stop needing me. In this sense, I take the end of the coaching process as seriously as the beginning (and the middle). I understand the importance of helping you maintain and build on the changes you have achieved during coaching once it ends, so I offer a comprehensive wrapping-up process to help you ensure you have all the resources you need to take your next life steps confidently on your own. I also offer 1-month and 3-month follow-ups as standard; at these points, we can share a few emails or have a short call to celebrate what’s going well, deal with any difficulties that may have cropped up, and explore any questions that have arisen.

Can coaching happen alongside therapy or counselling?

Coaching and therapy or counselling are not incompatible. For them to be usefully complementary, it’s important that everyone involved knows what’s going on. If you are working with a doctor, counsellor, therapist, nutritionist, or other healthcare professional(s) and you decide to start coaching with me, I’ll ask you to tell them about your decision; you could also show them this document and invite them to contact me if they have any questions or concerns. In some cases, conflicts or discrepancies may arise between the coaching work we do and your professional healthcare support. If this happens, I ask that you let me know as soon as possible so that together we can clarify and resolve the problem.

Are the fees negotiable?

Coaching takes time and mental effort to do well, and I charge enough to make it financially sustainable for me. If you’re in a financially difficult situation, though, and the standard fees are unmanageable for you, please get in touch and we’ll see whether we can work out a solution, for example by adjusting the standard template in some way. I also offer a 10% discount for bookings of 12 weeks’ coaching or more.

How can my friends and family help?

If you think it will be helpful to involve anyone else in the coaching process, please let me know. Coaching is about making you healthier and happier, but we are all social creatures, and sometimes personal change cannot happen without specific kinds of involvement from other people in your life. That involvement may be about reducing obstacles to your progress or creating solid support networks or adding a bit of fun to the process, or any number of other contributions. If it seems there might be a benefit in a conversation involving a third person more closely in your coaching, we can discuss whether this is something you want to do, and if so, you or I can approach the other person to invite them to be involved.

I occasionally work with clients under the age of 18, if they are also supported by a healthcare professional or a broader team. When I do so, we make specific agreements about safeguarding and confidentiality that include at least one parent or guardian as well as the client themselves.

I will never make contact with any third party without your consent, except where I have serious and immediate worries about your or someone else’s safety. (These edge cases are described in the contract that you’ll sign before coaching begins.)

Why do you offer coaching?

In 2009 I launched my Psychology Today blog, which began as a largely personal account of my experience of anorexia and recovery and gradually became a place where I bring together the personal experience and the science of eating disorders. A significant chunk of my life in the first decade of the blog (before Psychology Today removed comments from all its blogs) was spent replying to blog readers’ comments and questions, many of them specifically about the practicalities of recovery: how to do it, how to cope with how uncomfortable or painful or frightening (or exhilarating) it feels, how not to stop halfway, how to let the rest of life back in after long absence.

Over the years, I identified many common threads in these questions from readers, but each was also unlike any other. I did all I could to answer every question with care and honesty, and sometimes perhaps my answers were a helpful part of a reader’s movement away from illness. Some exchanges continued over months or years; in others, we shared just one or two messages each way. Sometimes I heard back from someone years later, whether because life was good now or because it wasn’t yet (or anymore). Quite often I wondered: Did what I say help? Could I have done anything more? Sometimes I felt that with a more sustained kind of contact, more significant and lasting progress could have been made.

And this is where the idea for coaching came from: to expand that kind of web and email contact into something more substantial. To talk with you face to face (thanks to the magic of video chat). To learn more about what exactly your life is like now, and what you want for your future. To create for you precise and practical experiments to challenge your assumptions and your habits and help you see how much can be different. To help you persist, or change tack, when success isn’t immediate. To share glimpses of some of the beauty that life and the universe hold when the blinkers of disordered eating are cast aside.

Sadly, one of the reasons why people end up reading my blog and reaching out with questions seems to be a set of profound failings in the way eating disorders are currently treated and understood; I’ve begun to explore these problems, and suggest solutions to them, in my blog posts and in my academic research. In the meantime, coaching is my way of offering something different, something more wholly committed to restoring agency to you, the person whose life this is, the person who gets to choose whether to recover and if so, what the process of recovering and the endpoint of being recovered will look and feel like.

Finally, and pragmatically, coaching is one means by which I earn a living. I have a portfolio career involving a range of freelance activities as well as a small amount of unpaid academic research and writing. I’d love to live in a world where money wasn’t always a question that needed asking when we‘re deciding how to use our short time on this planet, but sadly that world doesn’t exist yet. Until it does, thank you for understanding my need to charge for some of the time I give in trying to contribute meaningfully to the world before I die.

If you have any more questions, feel free to write to me via the contact form or by email at emily [at] hungerartist.org. Meanwhile, thanks for your interest in coaching with me.