Eating Disorder Intensives · In-Home & In-Vivo · Virtual Intensives in 40+ States

When Your Child Won't Eat,
We Bring Intensive, Expert Support Into Your Home.

The Evidence-Based Treatment Institute offers specialized eating disorder intensives for adolescents and adults with anorexia, bulimia, ARFID, and OCD-driven restriction, delivered in your home and in the real-world places eating disorders take hold across South Florida, Houston, Denver, and Chicago, with a structured virtual intensive option, billed at each clinician's standard session rate, for families in Austin and across 40+ states.

Recovery has to happen where the eating disorder actually lives, so our intensives go there. We deliver concentrated treatment in your own home, where meals and mealtime battles happen, and longer, real-world sessions out in the community, what clinicians call in-vivo work: the grocery store, the restaurant, the family dinner table. That is where we do the work.

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FBT, CBT-E, ERP, CBT-AR, DBT & RO-DBT
In-Home & In-Vivo in 4 Metros
Virtual Intensives in 40+ States
Anorexia, Bulimia & ARFID
What We Treat and How

Built First for Anorexia and Bulimia.

At its core, this intensive treats anorexia and bulimia: the restriction, the bingeing and purging, the fear of weight gain, and the medical and nutritional realities of renourishment. Everything else is built around getting nutrition restored and eating-disorder behaviors interrupted, because nothing else in treatment can take hold until that work is underway.

For teens, we anchor treatment in FBT.

For adolescents, Family-Based Treatment is the anchor. FBT puts parents in charge of renourishment at home, with our clinician coaching you through meals, limit-setting, and the eating disorder's resistance in real time. It doesn't wait for your teen to be motivated. It restores the physical conditions under which recovery becomes possible in the first place. This is the foundation, and it stays the priority.

Alongside FBT, we treat the patient individually.

Renourishment alone is rarely the whole story. So alongside FBT (and, for adults, as the primary treatment itself), we work individually with you or your teen on what keeps this particular eating disorder going: the overvaluation of shape and weight, the rules and rituals, the body checking, the thinking patterns (the work of CBT-E). The balance is clinical and deliberate: as long as FBT is going well and nutrition is on track, we expand the individual work; if the eating disorder reasserts itself, FBT comes back to the front. The two move together, with weight and behavior change always setting the pace.

And we treat what comes with it, because that is the norm, not the exception.

Eating disorders almost never arrive alone. OCD and anxiety disorders co-occur with anorexia and bulimia at strikingly high rates: contamination fears, "just right" rituals, intrusive harm thoughts, social anxiety, and a deep intolerance of uncertainty that sits underneath the eating disorder and feeds the restriction and rigidity. Treating the eating disorder while ignoring these is how recovery stalls. So the same individual work that treats the eating disorder also weaves in ERP for the co-occurring OCD and anxiety. And for adolescents, we can run the FAM Model (FBT-Anchored Modular Model), an approach Dr. Zach Appenzeller developed to treat the whole person without ever loosening the anchor. FBT is non-negotiable: for adolescents, nourishment comes first and parents are empowered to deliver it. But the modules run alongside FBT, not after it. For as long as your teen is willing to engage, CBT-E runs concurrently to work on the eating disorder directly. When OCD is part of the picture, ERP principles are woven in from the start, helping your teen sit with uncertainty at exactly the moments refeeding provokes it, while you keep refeeding. When severe dysregulation threatens the work, DBT or RO-DBT skills are added, not a detour from FBT but an enhancement of it. When oppositional or explosive behavior disrupts your family's ability to run treatment, PMT is added to restore it. When trauma is part of what maintains the picture, PE or CPT joins the work. And whenever treatments compete for a family's adherence, FBT anchors all, and always wins.

We also attend to the emotional engine beneath the behavior. For some patients the eating disorder manages overwhelming emotion, and DBT skills offer other ways to tolerate distress. For others it runs on the opposite: rigid emotional overcontrol, perfectionism, and inhibition. That is where RO-DBT does the work. Knowing which one is driving the eating disorder is part of how we match an intensive to you or your child.

ARFID is the exception to all of this: a fundamentally different picture with no body-image driver, treated on its own track with CBT-AR, FBT-ARFID, and graduated food exposure. You'll find it described in its own card below.

The Case for Intensive, Home-Based Care

Why the Home Is Where Eating Disorder Recovery Has to Happen.

Eating disorders don't happen in a therapy room. They happen at the kitchen table, at the grocery store, at dinner with friends, at breakfast alone. Treatment that stays in that room treats only a fraction of where the disorder lives.

Outpatient therapy, one session a week, was designed for patients with the capacity to implement what they learn between sessions. Eating disorders, particularly at moderate to high severity, frequently outpace what weekly outpatient can provide. You leave the session with a clear plan. By Tuesday, the eating disorder has won every meal.

This is not a failure of motivation or willpower. It is a mismatch between treatment dose and disorder severity. Eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa, have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric condition. They are biologically driven, cognitively entrenched, and extraordinarily skilled at recruiting your intelligence, or your child's, against recovery.

The answer is not simply more sessions in a therapy room. It is treatment in the place where the disorder operates, with a clinician present to coach in real time, troubleshoot in the moment, and help your family build the habits and confidence that recovery requires.

In-home intensive treatment is not a last resort. For many families, it is the most direct path to recovery, and the one that prevents a more restrictive, more expensive level of care.

Weekly Outpatient

One session a week: the right starting point for many patients and families.

EBTI Intensives

The same FBT and CBT-E at a higher dose: in your home, at your table, where the disorder lives.

IOP / PHP Programs

Structured group-based day programming, several hours a day on multiple days per week.

Residential / Inpatient

24-hour supervised care for patients whose medical safety or severity requires it.

Where our intensives sit on the continuum of care.

Is This the Right Level of Care?

Who Our Intensives Are Built For.

Our intensives are built for a specific group: patients and families for whom outpatient therapy isn't enough, but who don't need, or don't want, inpatient or residential treatment. If any of the following describes your situation, an intensive may be the right next step.

Families in FBT Phase 1

Adolescents with anorexia or bulimia

FBT Phase 1 is the most demanding phase of treatment, and the one most likely to stall without enough support. We're in your home during meals, coaching in real time, and we stay available between sessions to help you get through Phase 1.

Adults in Acute Restriction or Relapse

Anorexia, bulimia, ARFID in adults

Adults with severe or entrenched restriction, purging behaviors, or ARFID that has not responded to weekly outpatient. Adults who need the structure of regular clinical contact to interrupt patterns that have become automatic.

Patients Stepping Down from Higher Care

Post-residential or post-PHP transition

The transition from residential or partial hospitalization back to outpatient is one of the highest-risk periods in eating disorder recovery. Our intensives concentrate support in the hardest stretch, when meals move back to your own table, then step down to the weekly outpatient care that carries recovery forward.

Families Who Have Stalled

Prior treatment not producing progress

Families who've been in FBT or outpatient treatment for months without enough weight restoration or behavior change. An intensive can create the momentum that breaks the stall and gets recovery moving again.

OCD-Driven Restriction

When OCD, not body image, is the driver

Patients whose food restriction is driven mainly by OCD contamination fears, harm OCD, or just-right compulsions. This overlap of OCD and an eating disorder requires ERP delivered at meals, in the home, where the OCD actually shows up.

ARFID, a Distinct Intensive

Sensory, fear-based, or low-interest eating, not body image

ARFID is its own kind of intensive, and a different one from our anorexia and bulimia work. There is no drive for thinness and no shape-or-weight concern: the restriction is driven by sensory aversion, fear of choking or vomiting, or simply low interest in food. We treat it with CBT-AR (and, for children and teens, FBT-ARFID), with graduated food exposure (ERP) at the heart of the work, conducted at your own table, building the range and volume of safe foods step by step. For children, adolescents, and adults.

Patients Without a Local Specialist

Virtual intensive · 40+ PSYPACT states

Families in states where FBT-adherent or ERP-trained eating disorder specialists don't exist. Our virtual intensive brings the same specialist care to families in 40+ states.

A note on medical stability: Our intensives are built for patients who are medically stable, or who can be safely monitored as outpatients with appropriate medical oversight. If you or your child needs medical hospitalization to stabilize physically, that comes first. We coordinate closely with medical teams and can begin intensive work as soon as you or your child is medically cleared.
The Treatment

What an Intensive Actually Looks Like, Calibrated to Your Family.

An intensive at the Evidence-Based Treatment Institute is not a program you enroll in, and it is not a group. It is the same one-to-one treatment we deliver in weekly care (working directly with you or your child, or with your family together), delivered at a higher dose: more frequent visits and longer visits, calibrated to what your situation needs and adjusted as things change. There's no fixed curriculum and no standard schedule applied to every family. What follows is an honest description of what most intensives include, and why each part is there.

Frequency and format:

Ways we increase the dose

  • More frequent visits: several times a week rather than once, as the situation calls for
  • In-home visits: double the clinician's session rate ($550–650/hour), 2-hour minimum per visit (South Florida, Houston, Denver, and Chicago)
  • Virtual sessions: more frequent, longer video sessions at each clinician's standard session rate (40+ states)
  • A clinician present at the highest-risk meals: breakfast, lunch, or dinner, depending on the clinical picture
  • Structured family coaching within each visit
  • A weekly clinical review: a careful look at how behaviors are changing, and adjustments to the treatment plan
  • Between-visit availability for urgent questions and real-time troubleshooting

What a typical visit includes

  • In-home or virtual meal support: a clinician at your table, or on video, for the meals that call for it
  • Real-time parent coaching during and after meals
  • Exposure work in the kitchen, grocery store, restaurant, or any environment the eating disorder has taken over
  • Individual session time (CBT-E for adults) or family session time (FBT for adolescents)
  • Parent debrief and planning after our time with your child

The schedule above is a framework, not a formula. A family in FBT Phase 1 with an adolescent refusing all meals will look different from an adult with ARFID who needs graduated exposure to new foods. We build the intensive around the clinical picture.

What We Use and Why

Evidence-Based Treatment Delivered Where It's Needed Most.

The treatments we deliver in our intensives are the same evidence-based approaches used in our outpatient work. The difference is not the treatment. It is the setting, the frequency, and the immediacy of clinical support.

Treatment For Whom What It Looks Like In-Home or Virtually
Family-Based Treatment (FBT) Adolescents with anorexia or bulimia A clinician present at meals (in person or by video) to coach parents through serving the meal, setting limits, and managing the eating disorder's resistance. Real-time troubleshooting. Phase 1 acceleration.
Enhanced CBT (CBT-E) Adults with anorexia, bulimia, or BED Structured sessions covering CBT-E modules: a formulation we build with you (a map of what keeps the eating disorder going), behavioral change, and work on the thinking patterns that hold it in place. Meal support added where it's needed.
CBT-AR & FBT-ARFID Children, adolescents, adults with ARFID CBT-AR with graduated food exposure (ERP) at its core (in the kitchen, at family meals, in the grocery store), plus FBT-ARFID for children and teens. Parent coaching on structuring exposures between visits. Video-supported exposure for virtual format.
ERP for OCD-Driven Restriction Any age with OCD maintaining eating patterns In-vivo ERP where OCD gets in the way: during meal preparation, at the table, in the supermarket. Real-world exposure with a trained clinician present or coaching live by video.
DBT Skills Patients whose eating disorder co-occurs with emotion dysregulation Distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal skills coached in the moments dysregulation actually happens (at meals and in daily life) for patients who restrict, binge, or purge to manage overwhelming emotion.
RO-DBT Skills Patients whose eating disorder is driven by emotional overcontrol Skills coaching built into life at home. Social signaling, flexible engagement, and connection-building, practiced in everyday family situations.
FBT Parent Coaching Parents of adolescents in FBT Intensive parent skill-building: how to respond to food refusal, how to set limits calmly, how to separate your child from the illness, and how to keep doing what helps recovery when the pressure doesn't let up.

For adolescents with co-occurring eating disorders and OCD or anxiety, our intensives can run the FAM Model, the FBT-Anchored Modular Model developed by Dr. Zach Appenzeller. The model anchors the work in Family-Based Treatment and layers ERP, CBT-E, and biotemperament-informed modules alongside it. It is one coordinated treatment. Neither diagnosis waits its turn.

Program Formats

Two Ways to Access Intensive Care, Calibrated to Your Situation.

There are two ways to do intensive eating disorder work with us. Both are the same thing: flexible, higher-dose 1:1 treatment that draws on FBT, CBT-E, ERP, CBT-AR, DBT, and RO-DBT as your situation calls for. We work with you or your child alone, or together with your family. The two formats differ only in where and how they're delivered. The right one depends on your clinical picture, your family situation, where you live, and how much structure you need.

1:1 In-Home · 4 Metros

In-Home Intensive

A licensed clinician comes to your home (your kitchen, your table, your environment) for structured, high-frequency 1:1 treatment. Meal support, exposure work, parent coaching, and real-time troubleshooting happen where the eating disorder lives.

Available in four metro regions where we have specialty in-home clinicians: South Florida (Boca Raton and surrounding communities), Houston, Denver, and the Chicago area.

$550–650/hour · 2-hour minimum per visit · Flexible scheduling
1:1 Virtual · 40+ States

Virtual 1:1 Intensive

A structured, high-frequency 1:1 telehealth intensive delivering the same clinical work as our in-home intensive, adapted for the virtual format. A clinician is available by video during meals, coaching in real time as your family navigates the table.

Available to families across all 40+ PSYPACT states. Particularly valuable for families in areas where no local FBT-adherent or specialty eating disorder clinician exists.

Billed at standard session rates (same as weekly therapy) · 40+ PSYPACT states

Most families offset a meaningful portion through out-of-network benefits: see how reimbursement works.

If weekly sessions aren't providing enough, this is what a higher level of care looks like, without leaving the specialist team you trust. Reach out to talk through fit.

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From First Contact to First Visit

How Our Intensives Work: From Inquiry to Treatment.

Families who ask about intensive treatment are often in crisis. So we've built our intake to move quickly, give you clear information, and get treatment started as soon as clinically possible.

1

Initial Inquiry

Contact us through our new patient inquiry form or by phone. For intensive inquiries, we aim to respond within hours. Tell us what's happening. We don't need a polished summary. We need to know whether your situation is one we can help with.

2

Clinical Screening Call

A brief call with one of our clinicians to understand the clinical picture: diagnosis, severity, treatment history, current medical status, and what you've already tried. We use this to determine whether our intensive is the right level of care and identify any medical coordination needed before we begin.

3

A Careful Look, Then a Plan

An extended first session, in your home or by telehealth. We take a careful look at the diagnosis, your treatment history in detail, how your family works, and what keeps the eating disorder going. By the end of this session, a written treatment plan is already taking shape: specific goals, a timeline, and a schedule.

4

Logistics and Fee Agreement

We discuss the full fee structure, the schedule, and any coordination needed with your child's medical team, school, or other providers. We answer every question before treatment begins. No surprises.

5

Treatment Begins

We prioritize intensive inquiries. When you're ready and the clinical fit is confirmed, we move.

6

Ongoing Review and Transition Planning

Throughout the intensive, we hold a formal clinical review every week: checking progress, adjusting the treatment plan, and planning the transition to a lower level of care. We don't extend an intensive past what's clinically necessary. The goal is always the same: you and your family reach the point where weekly outpatient is enough, and we help you get there.

Where We Work

Intensive Services: Geographic Reach and Formats.

Our eating disorder intensives come in two formats: in person in our in-home metro regions, and by telehealth in 40+ states.

In-Home: Available in 4 Metro Regions

In-person · $550–650/hour

Clinician travels to your home in South Florida, Houston, Denver, and the Chicago area. Full in-home presence for meals, exposures, and family coaching.

2-hour minimum per visit

Virtual Intensive: 40+ States

Telehealth · Standard Session Rates

Structured, high-frequency virtual intensive delivering the same clinical work as our in-home intensive. Video sessions up to daily, live meal support by video, parent coaching, and between-session availability. We provide telehealth under PSYPACT, so check whether your state participates.

Available in 40+ states via PSYPACT

Traveling to One of Our Cities

For families seeking specialist care

Some families travel to one of our in-home regions (Boca Raton, Houston, Denver, or Chicago) specifically for access to specialist care not available in their region. If you do the same, we provide intensive support where you're staying, for a concentrated block of treatment. We talk through the logistics, and whether it's workable, on your screening call.

By arrangement
Why This Approach

What Sets Our Intensives Apart From What Else Is Available.

There are other intensive eating disorder options available: day programs, partial hospitalization, residential facilities, and some practices offering "intensive outpatient" levels of care. Each has its place. Here's how our intensives differ.

Home-Based, Not Facility-Based

Residential and PHP programs take you or your child out of the home for treatment in a clinical setting. Our intensives keep the work where recovery will actually have to hold, and build your family's ability to support it in real time: at your own table, in your own kitchen.

Family-Integrated, Not Family-Adjacent

Facility-based programs often offer family therapy sessions alongside individual treatment. Our intensives put your family at the center: we coach parents in real time, at meals, in the moments that matter. Families leave our intensive not just informed, but capable.

Delivered by Your Clinician, Not Support Staff

In many intensives, daily contact is with bachelor's or master's-level support staff while a senior clinician supervises. That is how a facility serves many patients at once. At the Evidence-Based Treatment Institute, your intensive clinician is a licensed psychologist or supervised clinician with specialized eating disorder training.

Individualized, Not Standardized

Facility-based programs often run a fixed curriculum: the same groups, the same schedule, the same materials for every patient. Our intensive is built specifically for your child or your situation, with a treatment plan that reflects your unique clinical picture.

Rapid Response for Crisis Cases

When a family is in crisis, time matters. We put intensive inquiries first and move as quickly as clinical fit and logistics allow.

Transparent About When to Refer Out

Our intensives aren't the right care at every level of severity, and we don't sell them that way. If you or your child needs residential care or medical hospitalization, we say so, and we help you through that referral. We will not keep anyone in an intensive past what it is built to do.

Who Delivers Your Intensive

The Same Specialist Team, Where the Work Needs to Happen.

An intensive is the same specialist eating disorder team you'd work with for weekly care, delivered at a higher dose, and in the places the disorder actually operates: your kitchen, the table, the real world.

Zach Appenzeller, PsyD

Zach Appenzeller, PsyD

Co-Founder & Director

Founding Director of the UTHealth Houston Center for Eating Disorders, a comprehensive program spanning outpatient, IOP, PHP, and inpatient care. Developer of the FBT-Anchored Modular (FAM) Model. Clinical Assistant Professor in Baylor College of Medicine’s OCD & Related Disorders Program. Specializes in eating disorders across the lifespan, especially the co-occurrence of eating disorders and OCD, and the complex, treatment-resistant presentations that demand the most from a treatment team.

Read Dr. Appenzeller's full bio
Renée D. Rienecke, PhD, FAED

Renée D. Rienecke, PhD, FAED

Licensed Psychologist

Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders and Director of Research at Eating Recovery Center/Pathlight Mood & Anxiety Centers. A study therapist and supervisor on the NIMH-funded trials that established FBT as the standard of care for adolescent anorexia and bulimia, and founding developer of the University of Michigan and Medical University of South Carolina eating disorder programs. More than 115 peer-reviewed publications on FBT, expressed emotion, and treatment outcomes. FBT and CBT-E for adolescents, young adults, and adults: in person in Chicago and virtually in 40+ PSYPACT states.

Read Dr. Rienecke's full bio
Kimberly Osborn, PhD

Kimberly Osborn, PhD

Licensed Psychologist

Specialty in eating disorders across children, teens, and adults: CBT-E, FBT, CBT-AR, and Feeling and Body Investigators (FBI) for young children with ARFID. Particular depth where an eating disorder co-occurs with OCD, anxiety, or trauma. Postdoctoral Fellow with the Eating and Anxiety Treatment (EAT) Lab at the University of Louisville, following her predoctoral internship at Duke University Medical Center, seeing patients at the Duke Center for Eating Disorders, and training on the adolescent inpatient unit of the Laureate Eating Disorders Program.

Read Dr. Osborn's full bio
Kaitlin Hill, PhD

Kaitlin Hill, PhD

Licensed Psychologist

At Rogers Behavioral Health, one of the country’s leading eating disorder and OCD systems, she helped develop the manualized eating disorder protocol used across every level of care, from inpatient to outpatient, and supervised the teams delivering it. Her CBT-for-eating-disorders training began at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Eating Disorders Clinic under Dr. Kelly Vitousek, a pioneer of CBT for eating disorders, and she has taught nationally on exposure therapy for eating disorders.

Read Dr. Hill's full bio
Eliza Lanzillo, PhD

Eliza Lanzillo, PhD

Licensed Psychologist

Specialized training in eating disorder treatment alongside her ERP work in the Baylor College of Medicine OCD Program: FBT for adolescents and CBT-E for adults, with particular depth where eating disorders co-occur with OCD, anxiety, and mood or safety concerns. A former suicide-prevention researcher in the intramural program of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Read Dr. Lanzillo's full bio
Nina Jolly

Nina Jolly

Eating Disorder Caregiver Peer Mentor (FBT)

An FBT-trained caregiver peer mentor who has walked the path families are facing. She supports parents through what Family-Based Treatment actually demands, especially the hardest stretches, when you're doing everything right and recovery isn't visible yet. Profoundly complementary to the clinical care here, she gives families the one thing treatment can't prescribe: someone who has been through it and come out the other side.

Read Nina's full bio
Allie Appenzeller, PsyD

Allie Appenzeller, PsyD

Co-Founder & Director

Specializes in the anxiety and OCD that so often drive and accompany eating disorders, and in working with parents, the people FBT asks the most of. Founding Director of the ARPA School Anxiety and School Refusal Program at Baylor College of Medicine, where she is a Clinical Assistant Professor, she brings deep skill in helping families hold firm through refeeding and recovery.

Read Dr. Appenzeller's full bio

Ready to talk it through? Reach out and a clinician, not a scheduler, gets back to you within one business day; intensive inquiries typically hear back within hours.

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Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions: Eating Disorder Intensives.

Residential programs take you or your child out of the home and into a facility for treatment. Partial hospitalization (PHP) and intensive outpatient (IOP) are facility-based programs you travel to daily. Some patients need that level of care. Our intensives are the inverse: we bring the treatment to your home, or deliver it live by video. That matters, because recovery has to happen in your actual life: at your kitchen table, in your family, in your home. Practicing recovery skills in a facility and then going home leaves a gap. Practicing them at home, with a clinician's support, closes it. Our intensives are also fully individualized: no group curriculum, no cohort schedule, no standardized programming. It is simply your weekly 1:1 (or family) treatment at a higher dose.

Yes, it can. Family-Based Treatment (FBT) doesn't require your child's buy-in, insight, or cooperation. It was designed specifically for adolescents who aren't able to motivate and direct their own recovery, because of what starvation does to the brain. The treatment works through you, the parent, not through your child's willingness. Your child can refuse to engage and argue at every meal and still be in the right place for FBT-based intensive support, because FBT isn't waiting for them to want recovery. It is restoring the physical conditions under which wanting recovery becomes possible. For adults, treatment takes more voluntary engagement, but even for adults who feel ambivalent, working on motivation is part of what we do early in the intensive.

In-home visits in our four in-home metros (South Florida, Houston, Denver, Chicago) are billed at double the clinician's standard session rate ($550–650 per hour), with a 2-hour minimum per visit. This reflects the travel time, everything an in-home visit includes (meal support, real-time parent coaching, exposure work, and a debrief), and the fact that meaningful in-home treatment can't be done in less time. A clinician arriving at your home for a single weekly session is not an in-home intensive. It is a standard in-person session with travel. The 2-hour minimum makes sure each visit is long enough to do the work. Virtual intensive sessions are billed at each clinician's standard session rate, the same as weekly therapy.

Because an intensive is simply your one-to-one (or family) treatment at a higher dose, virtual intensive sessions are billed at each clinician's standard session rate, the same as weekly therapy, prorated by session length. In-home visits in South Florida, Houston, Denver, and Chicago are billed at double the clinician's standard session rate ($550–650 per hour), with a 2-hour minimum per visit. There is no separate program fee. We discuss fees explicitly during your screening call and provide a complete written fee agreement before treatment begins. As with all Evidence-Based Treatment Institute services, we provide detailed superbills for out-of-network reimbursement, and many families offset a meaningful portion of the cost through out-of-network mental health benefits. HSA and FSA cards are accepted.

For virtual meal support, a clinician joins by video during the meal we've agreed on. They're on a screen at the table, where you and your child can both see them, coaching in real time as your family works through the meal. This includes guiding you through serving the food, managing eating disorder behaviors, and troubleshooting resistance as it happens. Virtual and in-home are two co-equal ways to get the same coaching. Meal support is one part of the virtual intensive, not all of it. A virtual intensive is the same intensive treatment delivered by video: sessions up to daily, live meal support, parent coaching, and between-session availability. For families beyond our in-home cities, it gives a higher, stronger dose of treatment than weekly outpatient care alone, and it has produced meaningful results for many of our families.

Most intensives run for two to six weeks of active treatment (several sessions per week, up to daily), depending on how severe the eating disorder is and on the specific goals of the intensive. The intensive isn't designed to be the whole of treatment. It's designed to build momentum quickly, reach specific clinical milestones (such as stabilizing weight, interrupting purging, re-establishing eating at family meals), and move you or your child into an outpatient structure you can sustain. We build a transition plan from the first day of the intensive, so the ending is expected and prepared for, not abrupt.

We build the transition plan from day one. Most patients transition from our intensive to weekly outpatient therapy, either with the Evidence-Based Treatment Institute directly (via telehealth if they are outside our in-person cities) or with a local clinician we help identify and brief. We do not end an intensive and leave families without a clear continuation plan. For many patients, the intensive establishes enough momentum and family capacity that weekly outpatient is fully sufficient afterward, and that is exactly the outcome we are working toward.

It can be. The transition home from residential care is one of the highest-risk periods in eating disorder recovery, and it's one of the situations our intensives are specifically designed for. The gap between the structure of residential care and the reality of home life is where relapse most commonly occurs, and where an in-home intensive can be most powerful. If your child has recently been discharged from residential or PHP and is struggling to maintain progress at home, please reach out. This is not a failure. It is a predictable challenge, and one we are well positioned to help with.

Yes, and in most cases, we actively prefer to. Eating disorder recovery is a team effort. We work alongside your child's pediatrician, internal medicine physician, dietitian, and any other treating clinicians to ensure coordinated, coherent care. We communicate directly with your treatment team, share progress updates with your consent, and ensure that what we are doing in the intensive aligns with and reinforces what the rest of your team is doing.
Take the First Step

If You're Reading This, You Already Know Your Child, or You, Needs More Than What They're Getting.

You've probably already tried weekly therapy. You've probably already had the conversations, made the plans, sat through the meals. And you've probably already watched the eating disorder win, repeatedly, in the place where it matters most: your home.

That is not a failure of effort or love. It is a mismatch between treatment intensity and disorder severity. And it is exactly the mismatch our intensives exist to correct.

A clinician, not a scheduler, responds to every inquiry within one business day. Intensive inquiries are answered first, typically within hours. If we're the right fit, we'll move quickly. If we're not, we'll tell you honestly and do our best to connect you with someone who is.

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