Eating Disorders & Disordered Eating

Specialized, evidence-based care for eating disorders and disordered eating across life stages, including pregnancy, postpartum, and midlife.

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Eating disorders are serious, treatable mental health conditions. They affect how you eat—and how you think and feel about food, your body, and control.

Eating disorders don’t just happen to teenagers—they often persist or emerge in adulthood.

Many women who seek care are high-functioning in work or at home. From the outside, things may look “fine.” Internally, eating, body image, or food-related thoughts can feel rigid, overwhelming, or out of control.

What is an Eating Disorder?

A mental health condition that disrupts eating patterns and body-related thoughts in ways that harm health and daily life.

Eating disorders are more common in women and affect about 2–5% of people over their lifetime.

Common diagnoses include:

- Restricting food intake
- Intense fear of weight gain
- Distorted sense of body shape or size
- Highest mortality rate of any psychiatric condition
Repeated binge eating followed by behaviors to “compensate” such as vomiting, laxatives, or overexercise
- Recurrent episodes of eating large amounts of food with a sense of loss of control
- No regular compensatory behaviors
- Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder
- Symptoms are serious but don’t fit neatly into one category

What is “disordered eating”?

Disordered eating includes patterns that may not meet full diagnostic criteria but still affect health and wellbeing.

Skipping meals or chronic dieting
Rigid food rules
Binge eating or chaotic eating
Purging or overexercise
Intense body dissatisfaction

These patterns can affect mood, sleep, relationships, fertility, and long-term health.

Why symptoms change across a woman’s life

Hormones

Hormones and the brain:
Estrogen and progesterone affect more than reproductive function. They influence mood, appetite, reward, attention, and stress response.
Hormonal changes can increase cravings, anxiety, body distress, or a sense of loss of control with food. This is where a reproductive psychiatrist can help clarify the picture.
Menstrual cycle

Some women notice that eating symptoms follow a monthly pattern. In the days before a period, you may experience:
Increased cravings or binge urges
Irritability or anxiety
Body dissatisfaction
Feeling less in control
Tracking timing—not just symptoms—can help identify patterns and guide treatment.
Pregnancy

A high risk time - 4% of women suffer from an eating disorder during pregnancy. Some experience improvement due to motivation to support the pregnancy. Others experience worsening symptoms due to:
Fear of weight gain
Body changes
Nausea becoming entangled with purging behaviors
A history of an eating disorder is important, even if symptoms have been quiet for years.
Postpartum

Eating disorders affect more than 9% of postpartum patients. Symptoms can be triggered by:
Sleep deprivation
Hormonal shifts
Pressure to “bounce back”
Identity changes
Breastfeeding can be meaningful, but also complex. Some women find it protective; others find it emotionally or physically difficult.
Perimenopause

The menopausal transition is another vulnerable period during which some women experience:
Return of old eating patterns
Increased binge eating or restriction
Body dissatisfaction, especially with weight changes
Sleep disruption and mood shifts
These changes are not simply “aging”—they reflect hormonal and neurobiological shifts.