Recovery Is Possible.
And It Starts With the Right Treatment.

What Makes the Evidence-Based Treatment Institute Different for Eating Disorders

First, fidelity. FBT, CBT-E, and exposure therapy delivered the way the research specifies, not a looser version that borrows the name. These treatments are hard to deliver well, which is part of why so few do. Doing them faithfully is the point of this one.

Second, a family that's activated, not sidelined. In the leading treatment for teens, parents are the heart of recovery, not a complication. If you were ever told to step back while your child was steered into individual therapy, and something in you resisted, your instinct was right. No one loves your child more than you do, and here you'll be treated like it.

Third, enough intensity for the moment you're in: the full evidence-based range under one roof, plus virtual and in-home intensives when weekly sessions aren't holding, so you're never handed off to strangers. All of it from clinicians who founded and directed academic eating-disorder programs and wrote treatment protocols used by hospital systems across the country: academic medical center–level expertise, in the warmth of a boutique private practice.

The Evidence-Based Treatments We Offer, and Who Each Is For.

Below is each treatment we offer: what it targets, who it's for, and the logic underneath it. Because when treatment makes sense, it's easier to commit to.

Family-Based Treatment (FBT)

Children and adolescents with anorexia or bulimia, and their parents, who become the treatment.

FBT is the most effective, research-supported treatment for adolescents with anorexia and bulimia, and it begins from a hard truth the starvation science makes clear: a malnourished adolescent brain cannot reliably choose recovery, and waiting for motivation costs time the body and the developing brain don't have. So FBT doesn't wait. It is agnostic about cause (no one is blamed, least of all parents), and it is not traditional "family therapy." It is a practical, action-oriented model in which parents temporarily take over the tasks the eating disorder has hijacked, with expert coaching every step of the way. Families often tell us this model finally "makes sense" of what they've been living with, and gives them a clear path forward.

Caregiver Peer Mentorship

Parents and caregivers carrying the weight of FBT.

FBT asks more of parents than any other treatment in mental health: holding boundaries through intense distress, staying calm at the hardest meals, making high-stakes decisions under fear and uncertainty. Our caregiver mentorship exists for exactly that weight. It is educational and skills-focused, led by Nina Jolly, an FBT-trained mentor with both professional experience inside our eating disorder program and lived experience as a parent who has walked a child through recovery. Grounded, pragmatic support from someone who has stood where you're standing, working in close concert with your clinical team to make the whole of treatment stronger.

Enhanced CBT (CBT-E)

Adults with anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder.

CBT-E is built on a precise insight: what started an eating disorder is not what keeps it running. At the core of nearly every case sits the same engine: the overvaluation of body shape and weight, a reliance on them as the primary measure of self-worth. Treatment begins by drawing out a personalized formulation of your specific illness, a collaborative map of the mechanisms maintaining it. For many patients this map is the first time their eating disorder has ever made sense: why willpower alone never worked, why it feels like the disorder runs on autopilot.

Then the map becomes the plan. Regular eating comes first, because it biologically breaks the restriction that drives bingeing. Then the work turns to the engine itself (the dietary rules, the body checking and avoidance, the shape-and-weight overvaluation), dismantled through behavioral experiments rather than argument, while you actively build a broader sense of self: your values, relationships, achievements, and identity beyond appearance. In time, CBT-E helps you see yourself the way the rest of the world already does: defined not by a body, but by a whole person. Treatment typically begins twice weekly and tapers as progress holds, ending with relapse prevention built around your specific vulnerabilities.

Exposure Therapy & Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)

All ages, woven through every eating disorder we treat, and essential where OCD or anxiety co-occurs.

In many ways, we view eating disorders as anxiety disorders. Whatever starts one, what maintains it is almost always fear and avoidance: fear of certain foods, fear of weight and body changes, fear of losing control, and ultimately fear of what might happen if eating were allowed to normalize. Those fears drive the behaviors that keep the illness alive: restriction, compulsive exercise, purging, endless body checking or total body avoidance. Each one buys a moment of relief and strengthens the disorder long-term.

ERP interrupts that cycle at its hinge. You approach the feared thing (the fear food, the restaurant, the number on the scale, eating in front of people) deliberately and gradually, while holding back the ritual or escape that usually follows. Repeated practice teaches the brain, through experience rather than reassurance, that anxiety subsides on its own, that feared outcomes are survivable, and that the catastrophic predictions, about both how likely the feared outcome is and how unbearable it would be, rarely come true. We deliver it where the fear actually lives: at the table, in the grocery store, in the moments between sessions. When OCD co-occurs with an eating disorder, as it so often does, ERP treats both engines at once.

SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions)

Parents of children and adolescents, including the child who refuses treatment.

SPACE is a parent-based treatment developed at the Yale Child Study Center for childhood anxiety and OCD, conditions that travel with eating disorders more often than not. It works entirely through you. We map the ways the family has been pulled into accommodating the fear (the reassurance loops, the avoided foods and places, the rituals the household quietly absorbs) and reduce them deliberately, while you learn supportive responses that communicate two things at once: I see how hard this is, and I know you can handle it. Because SPACE requires nothing of the child, it is often how treatment starts when a child won't engage. And when anxiety or OCD rides alongside an eating disorder, our FAM Model runs SPACE-informed accommodation work alongside FBT concurrently, so neither illness waits its turn.

Radically Open DBT (RO-DBT)

Adolescents and adults with restrictive presentations: the disciplined, high-achieving, privately exhausted ones.

Some people simply have too much of a good thing. Not all suffering comes from too little self-control; for many people with restrictive eating disorders, it comes from too much: perfectionism, rigid routines, emotion held tightly in check, a composed exterior over a profound loneliness. If you've ever been described as responsible, driven, and disciplined, and felt disconnected, unseen, or misunderstood underneath, that is the pattern RO-DBT was built for.

Where most treatments try to add control, RO-DBT deliberately loosens it. You learn to express emotion openly and authentically, tolerate uncertainty without a rulebook, loosen rigid rule-governed behavior, and rebuild the genuine social connection that overcontrolled coping shuts out: a life guided by values instead of rules. For the restrictive patient whose eating disorder is one expression of a lifelong overcontrolled style, this treats what other approaches never touch.

Multidiagnostic Eating Disorder Dialectical Behavior Therapy (MED-DBT)

Adolescents and adults whose eating disorder is entangled with intense emotions, impulsivity, or co-occurring struggles.

It exists for the presentations standard protocols leave behind: eating disorders interwoven with emotion dysregulation, where bingeing and purging function as ways to escape unbearable feeling, and where self-harm, impulsivity, or mood instability keep interrupting treatment itself. If treatment has repeatedly stalled because "something else keeps coming up," that is not a personal failure; it is a sign the treatment wasn't built for the whole picture.

MED-DBT is. It brings the full dialectical behavior therapy architecture (distress tolerance, emotion regulation, staged targets that stabilize the most dangerous behaviors first) and aims it at the eating disorder and everything tangled around it, together rather than sequentially. You learn concrete skills that do what the eating disorder has been doing (regulating overwhelming emotion) without the cost. It is a treatment for complexity, built for the patients most often told they are "too complicated" for eating disorder care.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for ARFID (CBT-AR) & Family-Based Treatment for ARFID (FBT-ARFID)

Children, adolescents, and adults with ARFID.

CBT-AR is a structured, exposure-based treatment developed specifically for avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder: the eating disorder that has nothing to do with body image. ARFID's restriction runs on one or more of three engines: sensory sensitivity to taste, texture, or smell; fear of aversive consequences like choking, vomiting, or stomach pain; or low appetite and limited interest in food. A child who eats seven foods, an adult who hasn't tried a new food in a decade, someone who stopped eating solids after one terrifying choking episode. Treating any of them like anorexia fails, because the engine is different.

CBT-AR proceeds in a clear sequence: psychoeducation and a consistent eating pattern first, then correcting nutritional deficits, then expanding volume and variety through systematic, graded exposure, matched to your specific engine, in session and between sessions, with predictions updated after every exposure so rigid expectations about food loosen against real experience. For children and teens, a family-based version, Family-Based Treatment for ARFID (FBT-ARFID), puts parents at the center: the same neurobiological logic as FBT for anorexia, adapted for ARFID, with parents leading the home exposures, structure, and nutritional gains their child cannot yet drive alone. For medically stable, motivated adults, an individual format hands you the lead. Families consistently see measurable gains: broader diets, less fear at the table, and a fuller re-engagement with daily life.

Feeling and Body Investigators (FBI)

Young children with ARFID, roughly ages four to ten.

For a young child, ARFID rarely announces itself as an eating disorder. It looks like a child who is terrified of throwing up, who reads every stomach gurgle as an emergency, whose list of safe foods keeps shrinking, and who cannot yet explain any of it, because the fear lives in body sensations a six-year-old has no words for. Feeling and Body Investigators, developed at the Duke Center for Eating Disorders, was built for exactly this child.

FBI turns treatment into detective work. Body sensations get names, faces, and case files; the child becomes an investigator, running playful experiments, in session and at home, to find out what a pounding heart or a gurgling stomach actually means, instead of treating every signal as danger. Underneath the play is serious clinical machinery: interoceptive exposure, the same principle we use with adults, translated to the level of a young child, with parents trained as co-investigators so the curiosity keeps working at the dinner table. FBI is newer than CBT-AR, with promising early research behind it, and we use it where it fits best: young children whose fear of their own body sensations is driving the restriction.

Across all of it, the common thread: we always know what we are treating and why, and so will you.