Art Therapy and Eating Disorder Recovery

The Art of Nourishment: How Art Therapy Supports Eating Disorder Recovery

Eating disorders are a serious condition that distorts the way people eat and think about food. Eating disorders can cause one to feel immense stress about their body image and eating. People with eating disorders often struggle with depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. There are many reasons why someone might develop an eating disorder—such as cultural upbringing, social media, peer pressure, or family influences. For more information about eating disorders, visit The National Eating Disorders Association website: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/

As art therapists, we offer art directives in session with our clients. Art directives in art therapy are guided prompts offered to clients to help guide their creative process by tapping into self-expression, exploration, and emotional processing. A therapist might suggest something simple, like “draw a place where you feel safe,” or more abstract, like “use colors to show how you’re feeling today.” Art directives can be tailored to each person’s needs to offer a more individualized approach. Some effective art therapy directives for clients with eating disorders focus on body image and self-perception. For example, an art therapist might invite someone to create a life-size body outline and fill it with images or words that reflect how they feel about themselves. This exercise can reveal distorted self-perceptions, helping individuals recognize and challenge negative thoughts. Another common directive is using clay to sculpt a representation of how one feels about food and nourishment. By working with tangible materials, people can externalize their struggles and begin to reshape their emotional connections to eating and their bodies, and develop self-compassion.

Basic Emotion Painting (directive from the book Drawing From Within Using Art to Treat Eating Disorders, by Lisa D. Hinz)

Basic-emotions painting is helpful for folx with eating disorders because it works directly with the core challenges of eating disorders such as emotional avoidance, difficulty identifying internal states, self-criticism, and a disrupted relationship with the body. Many folx with eating disorders have learned to disconnect from or suppress emotions. Painting emotions places those feelings outside the body, on the page, where they can be looked at, studied, and tolerated without getting too overwhelmed. Creating this simple art directive is a wonderful start for folx struggling with eating disorders because it creates a visual vocabulary that can be returned to name the emotion vs relying only on behaviors (purging, restricting, binging). See above image as an example of this directive.

Written By EBAT Art Therapist Zaina Berger, MA, ATR-P, AMFT