In the event you’re fearful about your individual or another person’s health, you may contact Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity, on 0808 801 0677 or beateatingdisorders.org.uk. Or find US-based resources from the National Eating Disorders Association here.

Ani Waggoner has battled anorexia for 28 years. She’s been to seven different treatment facilities, and cycled out and in of recovery for her entire adult life. It wasn’t until her last residential stay, on the Renfrew Centre in Florida, that she hit a breakthrough. “A number of trauma is ingrained in my body, and my eating disorder played into that,” she says. Starvation was her way of punishing a body that she didn’t trust. 

This insight occurred in Renfrew’s movement room, where Waggoner was receiving somatic therapy. While progressing through slow, gentle gestures like stretching her fingers, tapping her feet and undulating her back, she was learning to unlock pent-up muscular tension. She began this work cowered under a table within the corner; by the top of her treatment, she was capable of travel across the ground, incorporating moves from her ballet background without triggering the perfectionism and insecurity that after kept her frozen in place. “I used to be so in my head that I wasn’t listening to the remaining of me,” she recalls. “Somatic therapy is the best way I got to trust my body.” 

Somatic, or body-based, therapy posits that the body is the seat of emotion. Using techniques like breathwork, yoga, dance and bilateral tapping, it goals to process psychic turmoil from what practitioners call the “bottom up.” Cultures all over the world have honoured the body’s healing power for millennia (think: tai chi in China and yoga in India, amongst many traditions), however it’s only recently entered mainstream Western wellness. Recent media coverage has forecast the potential of somatic therapy to treat every thing from depression to alcoholism, while on TikTok, videos hashtagged #somaticreleasemassage garner millions of views.

Amidst the clamour of enthusiasm for all that somatic therapy might cure, little has been said about its use in eating disorder treatment. This oversight is puzzling, considering that eating disorders hinge on disavowing the body’s wants and wishes. “A disconnect happens with eating disorders where you may’t be in your body since it doesn’t feel good to be in your body,” says Wednesdae Ifrach, an expressive arts therapist in Connecticut who uses somatic methods to treat eating disorders. It’s common for individuals with eating disorders to lose the ability to recognise hunger and fullness cues. “Even reading your individual likes and dislikes can turn into really difficult,” Ifrach says, since patients can’t distinguish between an eating disorder thought and an intrinsic bodily signal. Such profound disembodiment is why somatic therapy is particularly well-suited to treat eating disorders. By teaching interoception, defined as “sensitivity to stimuli contained in the body,” somatic therapists might help patients reclaim the sensory constructing blocks of lasting recovery. 

Unfortunately, interoceptive training will not be a priority at traditional eating disorder care facilities; a minimum of, not those that answer to insurance. Insurance firms demand evidence-based treatments, and somatic therapy is difficult to check quantitatively. Plus, the successful rollout of somatic interventions takes money and time – resources that corporate-run treatment centres are reluctant to provide, says Rachel Lewis-Marlow of the Embodied Recovery Institute in North Carolina.

Current statistics for eating disorder recovery are heartbreaking: relapse rates reach 70 per cent, and mortality rates are among the many highest of all mental illnesses. What somatic therapy offers – communion with the self as a body, a protean bundle of muscle, sinew and bone – might be the missing answer to this failing system.

Despite insurance barriers, somatic interventions are beginning to crop up in eating disorder care, often through yoga, dance and equine therapies. “The sphere is growing,” says Susan Kleinman, a board-certified dance/movement therapist on the Renfrew Center, “very slowly.” Today, she estimates that there are 20 to 25 clinicians together with her specialty in Florida; when she began at Renfrew, over 30 years ago, she was the just one within the state. 

Dr Ann Saffi Biasetti, a Recent York-based somatic therapist who specialises in eating disorders, sees her modality bubbling up at private-pay treatment centres, which “have more freedom to do what they need to do.” It’s not news that patients who pay out of pocket receive more modern care, which regularly means higher care. However the widening income gap, coupled with the fast-dwindling pool of eating disorder clinics, brings this inequality into sharper relief. 

Even individuals with robust insurance policy, or ample funds to complement them, may not access somatic therapy until it’s too late. In accordance with Dr Biasetti, somatic interventions are crucial within the early stages of eating disorder treatment, when patients are at the peak of bodily dysregulation. The onset of any treatment program will trigger a bunch of fight-or-flight responses, like a racing heartbeat and clammy palms, as patients are thrust into meal plans, weigh-ins and emotionally charged therapy sessions. Before they even begin to relearn hunger and fullness, cues that Dr Biasetti classifies as “high-level interoception,” it is crucial to determine awareness of essentially the most basic somatic fluctuations.  

Patients often come upon somatic therapy of their second, or fifth, or final attempts at recovery. Anastasia Nevin, a Recent York-based eating disorder dietitian who specialises in somatic healing, says that just about all her clients come to her after being failed by traditional providers. “Cognitively, they know what they’re presupposed to be doing,” she says, “yet there’s this inability to actually integrate that.” Dr Biasetti estimates that 60 to 70 per cent of her clients have already received inpatient treatment.

One explanation for the rampant relapse rates is that patients enact what Dr Biasetti calls “feigning.” Within the race to get well before insurance coverage dries up, they resort to performing behavioural changes – following a meal plan, refraining from a binge, flushing the bottle of laxatives down the bathroom – without probing the basis causes of their disorders. It’s relatively easy to examine off the boxes of recovery on paper; what’s harder is to own the interior experience of trauma that drives harmful behaviours to start with. 

Ani Waggoner, the Renfrew alum, is staggered by her outcomes from somatic therapy; overall, she calls the progress “insane.” Though she doesn’t yet consider herself fully recovered, she says she is closer than she’s ever been. Today, she loves finding moments of joyful connection together with her body – dancing to K-pop, twiddling with her cat, and staging outdoor photoshoots. She hopes to show dance to kids someday, and use her own experiences to advocate for eating disorder education.

“Sometimes we just don’t have the words to share what we wish to say,” Waggoner reflects. The excellent news? Our bodies do.