At Opal: Food+Body Wisdom, we understand that the journey to healing from ARFID is unique for each individual.
Our holistic approach to ARFID treatment combines both community support and personalized therapy to help take steps towards a life of recovery.
ARFID treatment specifics include:
- Individualized care plans that are co-created by client and staff
- Meal plans created by a Dietitian with specific meal time accommodations and food substitutions as clinically recommended
- Therapeutic meal and snack support by Milieu Therapists and Registered Dietitians
- Especially relevant group therapies offered include: Exposure Response Prevention Therapy, Facing Fears, and RO-DBT. These groups provide both community support and individualized focus to address specific challenges related to ARFID and anxiety.
What is Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID)?
- Eating or feeding disturbances that lead to inability to meet appropriate nutritional needs.
- Causes weight loss, nutritional deficiency, and psychosocial functioning declines.
- There are not body image concerns
- There three common categories:
- Selective eating/sensory selectivity (aka “picky eating”)
- Fear of aversive consequences (ie, vomiting, choking, etc)
- Poor appetite/lack of interest in food+eating
What are the Signs+Symptoms?
Adults struggling with ARFID could have long standing difficulties with eating and food, even from childhood or it could begin after an acute event like physical sickness or mental health struggles. Some things to look for include:
- Change in body weight, energy level, digestive distress
- Complaints of no appetite
- Increase in selectiveness of foods based on textures and other sensory characteristics
- Decrease in foods one is willing to eat
- Fear of what could happen after eating like vomiting or choking.
At Opal, we offer:
- Individual therapy, nutrition counseling, psychiatry, exercise experientials and family/relationship therapy available at the PHP and IOP levels of care.
- Health at Every Size, weight-neutral treatment approach
- Non-diet approach to food. Meals and snacks provided offer a wide variety of foods (highly processed, fresh, organic, non-organic, home-cooked, frozen, easy to prepare, etc.)
- Eating at meals and snacks are done with other clients and staff, as a community.
- A belief that adequate food intake is a foundational step in recovery.
- Exercise + Sport programming, which addresses exercise bulimia, exercise avoidance, and other exercise concerns
- Radically Open Dialectical Behavioral Therapy as a foundational treatment
- Group therapy including body wisdom group, movement group, self-inquiry, process groups, facing fears and more.
- Teaching/Didactic groups including Radically Open Dialectical Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Exercise + Sport Didactic, Health at Every Size Didactic, etc.
- Non-clinical lodging for PHP clients to use while in treatment is available for a weekly fee, as space available.
- Alumni outpatient groups
Check Your Biases
ARFID can be life-threatening for anyone that is experiencing it, regardless of body size, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, religion.