ABSTRACT
Sustained yoga practice facilitates eating disorder recovery. It brings the possibility and promise of connection that transcends the disorder and everyday life experience. Eating disorder treatment and recovery happen in and through relationships. Treatment and recovery pivot on the person noticing, accepting, and growing in their relationship with food, eating, people, places, and things. Integrated Eating makes regular use of yoga practice and yoga therapy. Nutritionists find yoga helps patients learn to explore and contain the self–and their relationship with the self. Living, breathing, and genuine relationships are scary for people seeking safety in the rigid, formulaic certainty of eating disorders. Throughout Integrated Eating, nutritionists strive to see eating as sacred communion with self and other people, places and things. Think of the mundane peanut butter and jelly sandwich: all it embodies, all it represents and all those who created it.
