The Emerging Role of Eating Disorder Coaching

For a long time, recovery was something that happened mostly inside an office — an hour a week with a therapist, a check-in with a dietitian, a doctor’s appointment. Important hours, all of them. But recovery is not lived in those hours. It is lived in the kitchen at six in the evening, in the grocery aisle, in the quiet of a Sunday afternoon when the old voice gets loud and there is no appointment on the calendar.

A coach walks beside you in the ordinary hours, where so much of recovery is actually lived.

That is the gap a trained recovery coach is built to fill. Not to replace the treatment team, and never to practice therapy, but to walk beside someone through the ordinary moments where so much of the real work happens. A good coach has often been there themselves. They know the terrain. They can say, with honesty, “I understand,” and mean it.

The field is finally catching on because the need was always there. When coaching is done well — with proper training, supervision, and a clear sense of its lane — it strengthens the whole team around a person in recovery. It is one more set of caring, competent hands, available in the hours that matter most.