Joy Metevier

I work with individuals and families to help clients reach full recovery from Anorexia Nervosa. I will meet my clients where they are, help inform them on how to nourish their brain and body, as well as how to create a sustainable relationship with food to maintain their recovery. I provide a mix of psychoeducation, nutrition counseling and nutrition education as a framework to help clients and families to understand the biological drivers behind the disease. With families, I follow Family Based Treatment as a guide to help caregivers who require more direction with meal planning, weight restoring recipes, and parent nutritional support.

I work with individuals struggling with the cycles of Bulimia Nervosa by first focusing on a harm-reduction model. Clients must be eating an adequate, satisfying diet full of variety if they are to decrease the binging and purging episodes. Clients often discuss how hopeless they can be with Bulimia, and I am here to tell you we can work together to stop the cycle and feel safe around food again!

If you can’t have certain foods in the house without eating the whole package in one sitting, or if you reach for a box of brownies after a hard conversation with a loved-one, you may be experiencing binge or emotional eating behavior struggles. These behaviors can become a pattern, despite your best efforts to change them, leading you to feel exhausted, powerless and full of self-contempt. Please do not stay in this place alone.

Binge eating disorder is the most common eating disorder and is a symptom of our diet industry and the social pressures of the “thin ideal.” I work with individuals to help them develop a new relationship with food where they feel safe and comfortable around all types of food. I use an inclusive model of meal planning, with a goal of eventually introducing triggering foods in a safe way. Reducing and eliminating your binge episodes is possible. Let me help you along that journey.

I work with clients who have recently been discharged from treatment centers and are on a meal plan – or those who feel they would benefit from additional structure on their recovery journey. I am of the mindset that a structured meal plan is a stepping stone to developing a balanced relationship with food with the eventual goal of intuitive eating. A meal plan removes the questions of, “Should I eat? How much should I eat? What should I eat?” Early on in treatment, these questions typically leave clients feeling paralyzed and panicked. With the meal plan in place, the client will, week by week, re-establish the ability to listen to their own hunger and fullness cues leading into a normal, intuitive eating experience.

Health at Every Size (HAES) is an evidence-based approach to health that promotes taking responsibility for our eating and exercise behaviors without trying to change our body size. If we listen to our inner wisdom and lived experience, we know that a lifetime of restriction, counting, measuring and joyless movement is not helping our well-being. Nor is it successfully keeping our body weight at some prescribed “healthy number.” The HAES model allows you to make your health a priority without the involvement of the scale.

Additionally, HAES confronts weight stigma and bias, which both contribute negatively to a person’s overall well-being. I work with you to examine your relationship with the scale and “dieting” and offer alternatives to these methods of self-regulation. I understand that for some, being on a diet has been a constant part of their lives. Curiosity, patience and kindness are my posture as you take the lead in exploring how to lay down “dieting” and pick up gentler ways of being.

Intuitive eating is a practice of becoming more in-tuned with what your body is feeling and needing. I work with my clients to incorporate intuitive eating principles and mindfulness to reduce binging or restricting. I help clients to re-integrate the brain and the body so as to allow them to feel and trust the hunger and fullness cues that have been damaged by restriction and diet culture. With intuitive eating principles, external regulators such as diets, food plans, food rules etc. are no longer necessary to “control” the body. Instead, clients learn to listen and trust in order to fully engage in the pleasure of food, be it alone or in social situations.

I also work with clients who tend to have a longer list of “do-not-eat” foods than “do-eat” foods. We will work together to slowly diversify what you eat, especially with clients who struggle to meet nutritional needs or have medical complications from their limited diet.

I work with parents of teens to help them formulate meal plans that will support the full nutritional rehabilitation of their child with an eating disorder. Family Based Treatment (FBT) is typically done without the use of a dietitian, however parents sometimes find that additional nutritional education and support during this stressful time can take some of the guesswork out of helping their child to full recovery. I provide practical tools such as meal frameworks and emotion-focused coaching scripts to lift the burden of meal time off of the caregiver in order to allow them fully support their child through the meal.

I am passionate about nutrition and providing supportive, evidence-based care to my clients. The world of nutrition and dietetics is complicated by diet-culture, making it difficult to determine what is scientific and what is pseudoscience. If you have struggled with your relationship with food and are willing to begin the journey to understanding this relationship more, then I invite you to work with me, so we can unpack some of these food rules together. As a registered dietitian, I am also proficient in the care of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions that can occur with eating concerns.

I work with clients who experience food-related-anxiety. Examples include fear foods, texture issues, or phobias such as swallowing or choking. I will help you develop a plan to decrease your fear of certain foods and work to help you feel safe when eating. A ladder approach allows clients to work through the anxiety of a low-stress food and then to gradually move on to higher-anxiety foods. With kindness, curiosity and persistence, we can work together to liberalize your diet and make you feel comfortable with a variety of foods and eating experiences.

All-Foods-Fit is an approach to nutrition that utilizes food diversity and food permissiveness (rather than food scarcity or restriction) as a way to develop a better relationship with food. With this philosophy, there are no “good” or “bad” foods. Food has no moral value except that which diet culture has placed on it. . The goal is not to limit the types of foods, but to allow a place for all foods in our lives and to make satisfaction, pleasure and connection the focus of our eating experiences.

FBT — Family Based Treatment

I work with parents of teens to help them formulate meal plans that will support full nutritional rehabilitation of their child with an eating disorder. Family Based Treatment (FBT) is typically done without the use of a dietitian, however parents sometimes find that additional nutritional education and support during this stressful time can take some of the guesswork out of helping their child to full recovery.

Meal Planning

I work with clients who have recently been discharged from treatment centers and are on a meal plan – or those who feel they would benefit from additional structure on their recovery journey. I am of the mindset that a structured meal plan is a stepping stone to developing a balanced relationship with food with the eventual goal of intuitive eating.

Nutrtitional Counseling

I am passionate about nutrition and providing supportive, evidence-based care to my clients. The world of nutrition and dietetics is complicated by diet-culture, making it difficult to determine what is scientific and what is pseudoscience. If you have struggled with your relationship with food and are willing to begin the journey to understanding this relationship more than I invite you to work with me, so we can unpack some of these food rules together.

ERP — Exposure Response Prevention

I work with clients who experience food-related-anxiety. Examples include fear foods, texture issues, or phobias such as swallowing or choking. I will help you develop a plan to decrease your fear of certain foods and work to help you feel safe when eating.

All Foods Fit

All-Foods-Fit is an approach to nutrition that utilizes food diversity and food permissiveness (rather than food scarcity or restriction) as a way to develop a better relationship with food. With this philosophy, there are no “good” or “bad” foods, with food having no moral value. The goal is not to limit the types of foods, but to allow a place for all foods in our lives.