In this episode, Johanna Kandel, founder of the National Alliance for Eating Disorders, joins Julie Church, RDN, Co-Founder of Opal: Food+Body Wisdom, for an honest and inspiring conversation. Johanna shares how her own eating disorder recovery led her to create a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to care, support, and education in the eating disorder field.
Listeners will hear more about the Alliance’s impactful support groups, recent policy shifts shaping treatment access, and ways to get involved in advocacy (see links below). Johanna’s grounded presence and humble passion bring recovery to life in a conversation filled with hope, insight, and practical ways to support healing for yourself and others.
Find Johanna:
The Alliance for Eating Disorders: https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com/team/
Advocate with your local lawmakers for The Nutrition CARE Act and/or Kids Online Safety Act:
https://eatingdisorderscoalition.org/email-your-legislators/
Register for Eating Disorder Coalition Advocacy Day on April 15, 2026 (virtual or in person in Washington DC):
https://secure.everyaction.com/KEt8EKlzMUq5DoFK-CouzQ2
Connect with Opal:
Thank you to our team…
Editing by David Bazzi
Music by Aaron Davidson: https://soundcloud.com/diet75/
Sound engineering by Ayesha Ubayatilaka at Jack Straw Studios
Transcription summary provided by Rev.com
Johanna Kandel, founder of The Alliance for Eating Disorders, shared her personal journey of struggling with an eating disorder for over a decade, which began in her youth as a ballet dancer. She described the significant challenges she faced in seeking help, including a lack of understanding from medical professionals and financial barriers to treatment. These experiences became the foundation for The Alliance, which she established 25 years ago. Kandel detailed the organization’s core services, which include a national helpline staffed by licensed clinicians, a comprehensive and free referral database, and numerous free, therapist-led virtual support groups. She also discussed her extensive advocacy work with the Eating Disorders Coalition, highlighting efforts to pass federal legislation like the Anna Westin Act and the Nutrition Care Act to improve access to care, awareness, and treatment for eating disorders.
Interviewee Background Johanna Kandel is the founder and CEO of The Alliance for Eating Disorders. Her work is informed by her own lived experience of recovering from a ten-year-long eating disorder. For 25 years, she has been a leading national voice in mental health policy and legislative advocacy, playing a key role in the passage of federal legislation aimed at improving treatment and access to care for individuals with eating disorders.
Key Points
- Johanna Kandel’s eating disorder was triggered by a ballet director’s seemingly innocuous suggestion to lose weight, which highlighted how cultural pressures can activate a genetic predisposition.
- Her path to recovery was obstructed by a lack of awareness from medical professionals, who failed to diagnose her, and by significant insurance and financial barriers that made treatment inaccessible.
- Her personal struggles directly informed the mission and structure of The Alliance for Eating Disorders, which focuses on providing free and accessible support, education, and access to care.
- The Alliance offers critical services, including a clinician-staffed national helpline, a non-pay-to-play referral database (findedhealth.com), and 19 weekly virtual support groups that have reached individuals in 88 countries.
- Kandel is deeply engaged in legislative advocacy to create systemic change, working to mandate insurance coverage for all aspects of eating disorder treatment, including medical nutrition therapy through the Nutrition Care Act.
- She stressed that eating disorders are non-discriminatory and that a primary goal of her work was to broaden the public narrative of who is affected to reduce stigma and ensure more people are seen and treated.
Notable Quotes
- “I think more than anything, I’m just a human of lived experience that wanted to give back and make a difference.” (01:15) – This was said as Kandel described her core identity and the primary motivation behind her work.
- “I didn’t wake up and look out the window in sunny West Palm Beach, Florida and said, ‘I feel like it’s a good day to have an eating disorder today.’ And yet what I discovered over the next 10 years is that’s very much how it was viewed and how it was treated.” (05:00) – This was stated in the context of explaining the unintentional start of her eating disorder and the societal misunderstanding she encountered.
- “I hated every minute of my recovery journey. I have to state that and it was the hardest thing that I ever did… you don’t recover to utopia, you recover to life.” (13:22) – Kandel said this while being candid about the immense difficulty of the recovery process, pushing back against any fairytale notions of healing.
- “We haven’t come this far to only come this far. We have to acknowledge how far we’ve come and continue putting one foot in front of the other.” (36:36) – This quote was shared as she reflected on the progress made in eating disorder advocacy while emphasizing the need for continued effort.
Kicker Quotes
- “You don’t recover to utopia, you recover to life. And there’s so much amazingness in that gray, in that rainbow between the black and the white.”
- “I do think that when you’re able to be seen and be supported, that’s when light comes in and that’s when healing happens.”
- “If you’ve been struggling with an eating disorder for a beat or a lifetime, I do believe in hope. I do believe in the power of community and connection and healing in community and that you don’t have to struggle alone.”
