Healing Your Relationship With Food and Your Body: A Therapist's Guide for Bergen County, NJ

If you've spent years thinking about food, what you ate, what you shouldn't have eaten, what you'll eat tomorrow, you already know how exhausting it is. The mental space that food and body image can occupy is enormous. And for many people living in Bergen County, Monmouth County, and throughout New Jersey, that exhaustion is quiet. Nobody around you can see it.

At Clear Light Therapy in Englewood, NJ, I created a clinical workbook called Healing Your Relationship With Food & Body specifically for clients who are tired of fighting this battle alone. The workbook is used in conjunction with therapy, but I want to share the core ideas here, because understanding why you struggle is often the first thing that makes healing feel possible.

This post walks through the ten areas we address in the workbook. Whether you have a diagnosed eating disorder, a long history of dieting, or simply feel like food and your body take up more mental space than they should, this is written for you.

You do not need to "look sick enough" to deserve help. Fewer than 6% of people with eating disorders are medically underweight. Most people who struggle never fit the stereotype.

1. Understanding Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating

One of the most important things I tell clients in Bergen County and Monmouth County is this: eating disorders don't have one look. Binge Eating Disorder is the most common eating disorder in the United States. It affects people of all body sizes, all genders, all ages, and all backgrounds. Men represent up to 25% of eating disorder cases — a fact that is still dramatically underreported.

The workbook opens here because so many people spend years in pain without seeking help, convinced their struggle isn't "serious enough." That belief is itself a symptom of how eating disorders are misrepresented in our culture.

The eating disorders we treat at Clear Light Therapy include:

• Anorexia Nervosa — severe restriction, intense fear of weight gain, body image distortion

• Bulimia Nervosa — cycles of binge eating followed by compensatory behaviors

• Binge Eating Disorder (BED) — recurrent episodes of eating large amounts without purging, often accompanied by intense shame

• ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) — restriction unrelated to body image, often driven by sensory sensitivity or fear

• OSFED (Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder) — significant eating disorder symptoms that don't fit neatly into another category

• Disordered eating — patterns like chronic dieting, guilt around food, and obsessive calorie tracking that cause real distress even without a formal diagnosis

If food and body image are causing distress in your life, that is enough to seek support. You don't need to wait until things get worse.

2. Why Eating Disorders Develop, It Is Never Just About Willpower

This is one of the most important things I want clients across New Jersey to hear: eating disorders are not about vanity, weakness, or lack of self-control. They develop through a combination of genetics, environment, and emotional factors — and they serve a purpose.

Biologically, traits like anxiety sensitivity, perfectionism, and emotional sensitivity can make someone more vulnerable to eating disorder behaviors. Environmentally, family messages about food, social media, weight stigma, and diet culture all shape how we relate to our bodies from a young age.

But perhaps most importantly: eating disorder behaviors often start as a way to cope with emotions. Restriction can create a sense of control when life feels chaotic. Binge eating can temporarily numb emotional pain. Purging can create a feeling of release. The behavior works in the short term — which is exactly why it becomes so hard to stop.

When we understand that the behavior developed for a reason, we can stop blaming ourselves and start asking: what healthier ways can meet those same needs?

This is the clinical work. And it's what we do at Clear Light Therapy with clients from Ridgewood, Teaneck, Paramus, Hackensack, Red Bank, Rumson, and across Bergen and Monmouth Counties.

3. Diet Culture — The System Nobody Asked to Be Part Of

Most people don't realize how deeply diet culture has shaped their relationship with food and their bodies. Diet culture is the system of beliefs that ties thinness to health, worth, and success and it is everywhere. Social media, advertising, family conversations, medical settings, fashion, fitness culture. We absorb these messages so young that they start to feel like facts.

They are not facts. They are cultural beliefs. And beauty standards change constantly — what's considered an "ideal body" has shifted dramatically even within the last 30 years. That instability reveals something important: these standards are social trends, not truths about what bodies should look like.

In the workbook, we explore the specific messages each person absorbed growing up, from family comments about weight, to media portrayals, to diet marketing and begin to separate personal worth from cultural conditioning. This piece of the work is particularly powerful for clients in our area, where academic and social pressures in communities across Bergen County can amplify diet culture's reach significantly.

4. Why Diets Don't Work — The Biology Behind the Frustration

Research consistently shows that the vast majority of people who diet regain the weight within two to five years and many regain more than they originally lost. If you've experienced this cycle, you may have blamed yourself. Almost everyone does. But the failure is not yours. It is the diet's.

When the body senses significant food restriction, it responds as if facing starvation because to your nervous system, that's exactly what it is. Metabolism slows. Hunger hormones increase. The brain becomes preoccupied with food. Cravings intensify. This is biology, not weakness.

The restrict-binge cycle that so many people experience diet, restrict, cave, overeat, shame, restart is a predictable biological response to deprivation. Understanding this doesn't mean giving up on health. It means letting go of the idea that willpower alone can override a survival system that has been hardwired for thousands of years.

The diet industry is worth tens of billions of dollars. If diets worked long-term for most people, it would be much smaller. When a diet fails, the industry profits from your return. When you blame yourself, they keep their customers.

5. Intuitive Eating — Learning to Trust Your Body Again

Intuitive eating is not a diet. It is a framework for rebuilding a relationship with food based on your body's actual signals rather than external rules. The goal is not to eat perfectly. The goal is to stop fighting your hunger, stop labeling foods as moral victories or failures, and start listening to what your body is telling you.

For clients who have spent years dieting — especially those in high-achieving communities across Bergen County towns like Tenafly, Ridgewood, and Alpine — this can feel terrifying at first. The diet mentality runs deep. Letting go of food rules can feel like losing control. But clinically, what we see consistently is the opposite: when foods stop being forbidden, they lose their power. The intensity of cravings decreases. The obsessive quality of food thoughts softens.

Core principles of intuitive eating we explore in therapy:

• Rejecting the diet mentality — letting go of the belief that your body needs to be controlled

• Honoring hunger — recognizing your body's early signals before reaching extreme deprivation

• Making peace with food — allowing all foods without shame, reducing their psychological charge

• Challenging the "food police" — noticing and questioning the internal voice that judges what you eat

• Discovering fullness — learning to notice satisfaction rather than stopping based on rules

• Coping with emotions without using food as the only tool

We combine intuitive eating principles with evidence-based therapy, CBT-E, ACT, DBT, and ERP where relevant, to create individualized treatment plans for clients across New Jersey.

6. Body Image and Body Respect — A More Realistic Starting Point

Telling someone who has hated their body for decades to "love themselves" is not a clinical intervention. It's a platitude. And it doesn't work.

That's why the workbook focuses on body respect as the starting point, not body love. Body respect means treating your body with care and dignity even when you don't like how it looks. It means eating when you're hungry, resting when you're tired, wearing clothes that actually fit, and speaking to yourself with something closer to neutrality rather than contempt.

We also use ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) techniques in this section, particularly cognitive defusion, which teaches clients to step back from body-critical thoughts. Instead of "I hate my stomach," the practice becomes: "I'm noticing my mind is having a thought about my stomach." That small shift observing a thought rather than fusing with it, creates space to choose a different response.

This is not about pretending the thought isn't there. It's about not letting it run your behavior.

7. Emotional Eating, What It Actually Means

Emotional eating is one of the most misunderstood concepts in mental health. The cultural narrative is that it's shameful, weak, or something to eliminate entirely. The clinical reality is more nuanced.

Humans have used food for comfort, celebration, and connection for thousands of years. Eating something enjoyable when you're upset is not a disorder. It becomes clinically relevant when food is the only coping strategy available, when there's no other way to tolerate difficult emotions, and food is filling the entire gap.

The workbook addresses emotional eating through a DBT- and ACT-informed lens: building a broader coping toolbox so that food doesn't have to carry all the emotional weight. This includes distress tolerance skills like paced breathing and the TIPP technique, cognitive defusion from urge thoughts, urge surfing, the practice of riding an urge like a wave rather than acting on it immediately and expanding non-food coping strategies that fit each person's life.

For clients in Bergen County and Monmouth County dealing with high-pressure careers, academic stress, or family demands, emotional eating often develops quietly over years. The workbook makes space for this history without shame.

8. Body Comparison, Social Media, and Your Genetic Body

Comparison is something the human brain does automatically, it is not a character flaw. But in the age of social media, comparison is happening at a scale and frequency that no previous generation has faced. The images being compared against are filtered, posed, professionally lit, and heavily edited. They are not reality. They are a highly curated highlight reel of other people's best angles.

The workbook addresses this practically: we look at what accounts are in someone's feed, which ones reliably make them feel worse about themselves, and what a healthier digital environment might look like. This is not about avoiding all social media. It's about making conscious choices about what you consume.

We also cover the concept of your genetic body, the weight range where your body functions best, regulates hunger and fullness most naturally, and maintains stable energy. Trying to maintain a weight far below that range requires constant biological war with your own body. Understanding that your natural body shape is significantly determined by genetics, not discipline, not effort, not moral worth, is often a genuinely freeing piece of information for clients.

9. Movement Without Punishment and Letting Go of the Scale

Exercise and movement become deeply complicated for many people struggling with body image and eating disorders. Movement shifts from something enjoyable to a form of punishment, debt repayment for food eaten, or a way to control a body that feels out of control.

The workbook invites a different question: what does my body actually need today? Not what will burn the most calories, or what will "fix" last night's dinner. What movement, if any, would feel supportive rather than punishing? Walking outside. Stretching. Swimming. Dancing in the kitchen. These count. And they feel fundamentally different from compulsive exercise driven by shame.

We also address body checking — the habit of repeatedly examining, measuring, or evaluating your body throughout the day — and scale obsession. Both behaviors provide temporary relief from anxiety while reinforcing and amplifying body image distress over time. Reducing them is a key part of treatment.

10. Building a Life Bigger Than Food

The final section of the workbook is perhaps the most important. Because eating disorder recovery is not just about changing what you eat. It's about reclaiming the mental and emotional space that food and body thoughts have been occupying.

Using values-based work from ACT, we help clients identify what truly matters to them, connection, creativity, adventure, relationships, contribution, and begin making choices guided by those values rather than by fear of food or body judgment. The question stops being "what did I eat today?" and starts being "did I live in alignment with who I want to be?"

This shift doesn't happen overnight. But it is what recovery looks like in practice. And it is what clients across Bergen County and Monmouth County, from Hackensack and Fort Lee to Red Bank and Rumson, tell us feels most like freedom.

Recovery is not about perfection. It is about building a relationship with food and your body that feels sustainable, compassionate, and genuinely yours.

Eating Disorder Therapy in Bergen County and Monmouth County, NJ

At Clear Light Therapy, we are one of the few practices in New Jersey equipped to treat eating disorders alongside co-occurring OCD, anxiety, and depression simultaneously. Our clinical team includes Dana Colthart, LCSW, CEDS, a Certified Eating Disorder Specialist, along with specialized therapists trained in CBT-E, DBT, ACT, and ERP.

We see clients in person at our Englewood, NJ office and via telehealth throughout New Jersey, including Bergen County, Monmouth County, Hudson County, Morris County, and Somerset County.

Bergen County communities we serve:

• Ridgewood, Tenafly, Alpine, Englewood, Englewood Cliffs, Fort Lee, Paramus, Hackensack, Teaneck, Bergenfield, Fair Lawn, Mahwah, Wyckoff, Oradell, River Edge, Saddle River, Ramsey

Monmouth County communities we serve:

• Red Bank, Rumson, Shrewsbury, Holmdel, Colts Neck, Middletown, Freehold, Marlboro, Tinton Falls, Asbury Park, Long Branch, Manalapan

We offer a free 15-minute consultation for anyone who isn't sure if therapy is right for them. Dana personally responds to every inquiry within 24 hours.

Schedule Your Free Consultation: danacolthart.com/contact-1 | (609) 384-4874 | 60 Chestnut Street, Englewood, NJ 07631

About the Author

Dana Colthart, LCSW, CEDS is the founder and clinical director of Clear Light Therapy in Englewood, NJ. She holds a Master of Social Work from Fordham University and is a Certified Eating Disorder Specialist with over a decade of clinical experience treating eating disorders, OCD, and anxiety. She is a member of the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF), the International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals (iaedp), and ANAD. Her work has been featured in Everyday Health, Psych Central, Mel Magazine, and CafeMom.

NJ LCSW License: 44SC06050300 | NPI: 1669186433 | @clearlighttherapynj