Motivational Interviewing for Eating Disorders

The First Dedicated Guide to Using Motivational Interviewing With Eating Disorder Clients

Motivational interviewing is taught in virtually every eating disorder training program. It is listed as a core treatment modality at residential programs across North America. Clinicians use it daily with clients who restrict, binge, purge, and exercise compulsively. And yet, until now, no book has been written specifically to teach clinicians how to do it well with this population. This is that book.

Why Standard MI Training Falls Short

Standard MI workshops use substance use examples. They assume the client recognizes a problem. They assume baseline cognitive functioning. They assume that respecting client autonomy will not result in the client's death. Eating disorders break every one of these assumptions. A client with anorexia nervosa may genuinely love her restriction. A client with bulimia nervosa may hide her symptoms behind a wall of shame so thick that honest disclosure feels impossible. A client with binge eating disorder may arrive carrying years of weight stigma from healthcare providers who never once asked why she binges. Generic MI training does not prepare clinicians for any of this.

What This Book Provides

Across twenty chapters and six clinical appendices, this guide adapts every core MI skill for eating disorder treatment. You will learn how to ask open questions that reduce defensiveness rather than trigger it, how to affirm clients without accidentally reinforcing the disorder, how to reflect in ways that separate the person from the illness, and how to build summaries that create discrepancy using the client's own words. Each chapter includes detailed case studies, clinical dialogue examples, and diagnosis-specific strategies for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and ARFID.

Advanced Applications for Complex Presentations

This book goes beyond the basics. It addresses MI with adolescents and families, MI in multidisciplinary teams, MI for co-occurring trauma and PTSD, MI adapted for autistic and ADHD clients, MI for severe and enduring eating disorders, and MI for exercise compulsion and orthorexia. It includes practical tools: session planning worksheets, change talk examples by diagnosis, adapted decisional balance templates, a values card sort designed for eating disorder populations, and an MI fidelity checklist for eating disorder settings.

Written for therapists, dietitians, nurses, physicians, and any clinician who works with eating disorders and wants to use motivational interviewing with greater skill, confidence, and clinical precision.