Eating Disorder & Binge Eating Clinical Supervision

Yes. I provide specialist eating disorder clinical supervision for counsellors and psychotherapists, delivered online across the UK and Ireland. My clinical focus is the psychological side of binge eating, emotional eating, disordered eating, chronic dieting and body image, and supervision draws on a current caseload in those areas rather than on training alone. Supervision is available as an ongoing arrangement or as one-off specialist case consultation.

Specialist eating disorder supervision is useful when the eating behaviour itself has become a significant part of the clinical picture and you want more detailed thinking about what maintains it. A generalist supervisor may be entirely capable of supporting your process, your contracting and your relational work, while having less familiarity with restriction and binge cycles, food rules, body checking or the psychological effects of GLP-1 medication. Many therapists keep their existing supervisor and add specialist input for the eating-related part of their caseload.

Yes. A large proportion of the therapists I see already have a main supervisor and come to me for specialist consultation on eating-related cases. This is an addition to your existing arrangement, not a replacement for it. Your primary supervisor and your professional framework stay exactly as they are, and clinical responsibility for the client remains with you.

Yes. Specialist case consultation is designed for a single eating-related case that you want to think through in depth, and it can be a one-off session or something you return to occasionally as the case develops. Therapists typically use it when they are unsure whether a presentation meets the threshold for an eating disorder, when the eating has changed shape mid-therapy, or when they are weighing up referral. Case consultation does not replace the supervision your professional body or employer requires.

Binge eating and emotional eating are the areas I work with most. Supervision commonly covers formulating the binge cycle, identifying restriction that the client does not recognise as restriction, distinguishing emotional eating from a diagnosable eating disorder, working with shame without reinforcing it, and deciding how much of the session to spend on food compared with everything else in the client's life.

Yes, and this is now a regular part of my supervision work. GLP-1 medication often reduces the frequency of bingeing without addressing what the eating was doing for the person, which raises specific therapeutic questions about what the work becomes, what happens to emotional regulation when food is less available as a strategy, and how the client will manage if the medication stops. Supervision covers the psychological and behavioural side of this. Decisions about the medication itself sit with the prescriber, and I do not advise on dosage, suitability or physical health.

Yes. ADHD and binge eating frequently overlap, and separating impulsivity, interoceptive difficulties, executive-function fatigue and emotional dysregulation from an eating disorder presentation is a common supervision task. I have completed specialist training in ADHD and binge eating with BEAT, and I work with this combination regularly. I am not an ADHD assessor and supervision does not include diagnosis, so where formal assessment is indicated we will think about how you raise that with your client.

No. Many of the therapists I supervise are generalists who have found eating difficulties appearing in a general caseload, often in clients who came for anxiety, trauma, ADHD or low mood. The purpose of specialist supervision is to support the work you are already doing competently, not to require you to retrain. Some supervisees are developing a specialist interest and want to build it properly; others simply want a well-informed second opinion on two or three cases.

Yes. All supervision is delivered online via Zoom, which means supervisees can be anywhere in the UK or Ireland. Online supervision is particularly practical for specialist input, since a supervisor with the right expertise is rarely a short drive away.

Appropriately qualified health and mental health professionals can access specialist psychological case consultation with me, which means thinking together about the psychological aspects of a client's relationship with food, weight and body image. This is different from profession-specific clinical supervision. If your regulator, professional body or employer requires supervision from someone in your own discipline, such as a registered dietitian, nurse, psychiatrist or practitioner psychologist, you will still need that separately. I can complement that arrangement, not substitute for it.

Scope of competence is usually a question of matching the specific presentation to your training, your experience and the support available around you, rather than a straightforward yes or no. In supervision we would look at what the client is actually doing with food, whether there are physical health or risk indicators that need medical input, whether the presentation is stable or escalating, and what would need to be true for you to continue safely. Sometimes the answer is that you carry on with specialist supervision alongside. Sometimes it is that you continue with the anxiety or trauma work while the eating is assessed elsewhere. Occasionally it is a referral. Uncertainty about competence is a good reason to bring a case, not a reason to delay bringing it.