Supporting Someone with an Eating Disorder: A Guide

Eating disorders are complex mental illnesses that require professional treatment, but the support of family and friends plays a crucial role in recovery. The challenge is that many well-intentioned attempts to help can inadvertently cause harm or push someone further away. Whether you're a parent, partner, friend, or play another part in someone’s life, understanding how to offer genuine support requires more than good intentions. It requires education, awareness of how your words shape the environment, and clarity about what your role can and should be.

The Foundation of Support

Learning about eating disorders is foundational to offering meaningful support. When you understand the psychological complexity of these illnesses, you're less likely to fall into simplistic thinking or offer "solutions" that don't address the actual problem. Eating disorders are not choices about food. They are serious mental illnesses with biological, psychological, and social components. Recognizing this fundamentally changes how you approach someone who is struggling.

 The more you understand about eating disorders, the better equipped you'll be to listen without judgment, recognize warning signs, and respond in ways that strengthen the relationship rather than strain it. Seek out quality information from qualified therapists, reputable organizations, and evidence-based resources. Our blog archive at the Kahm Center blog archive addresses many aspects of eating disorders, with posts like What is OSFED? ,  4 Ways Anorexia Impacts the Brain, and more. We provide this information for just these reasons—to help families and friends understand these complex illnesses and support recovery more effectively.

Understanding Your Role

You cannot control someone's eating disorder, but you can control how you show up. The appropriate level of involvement depends heavily on the nature of your relationship and the age of the person struggling.

If you're the parent or guardian of a child or adolescent, your role will vary significantly depending on the treatment approach being used. Some interventions, particularly those studied extensively with adolescents diagnosed with anorexia nervosa (such as Family-Based Treatment), involve substantial involvement in day-to-day decisions, including what food is being served and how meals are structured. It's worth noting that what counts as "evidence-based" is often limited by who was included in research studies and who wasn't.

Other treatment approaches focus more on developing age-appropriate autonomy and skills while keeping parents or guardians informed and engaged. What matters most is that you collaborate closely with the treatment team. Follow their guidance, ask questions when you need clarity, and share as much information as possible about what you're observing at home. You are the expert on your family member. The professionals are the experts on eating disorders. The most effective treatment happens when these two areas of expertise work together.

If you're the parent or guardian of an emerging adult, you're navigating a particularly complex developmental stage. Emerging adults exist on the cusp between dependence and independence, legally adults but often still requiring significant emotional, relational, and sometimes financial support. Their prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed, which affects judgment, impulse control, and other executive functioning skills. When an eating disorder takes hold during this stage, it often disrupts or delays the developmental milestones that define this period: establishing independence, pursuing education or career paths, forming relationships, traveling, and exploring identity. The eating disorder can freeze development in place, making it even more difficult to determine how much support is appropriate versus how much autonomy to encourage. Your role requires balancing these competing needs while working closely with treatment providers to understand what level of involvement serves recovery without infantilizing your loved one.

For parents and immediate family members of adults in their mid-twenties and beyond, the dynamics shift further. Agency and autonomy become central considerations. Your role is to offer support while respecting that your loved one makes their own decisions about treatment, disclosure, and how much they want you involved. This can be incredibly difficult, especially when you're watching someone you love suffer. You may want to fix things or take control of the situation, but doing so undermines the very autonomy that recovery requires. Focus on maintaining connection, expressing your care without trying to manage their choices, and being available when they reach out for support.

If you're a friend, your role can be one of the most significant sources of support in someone's recovery. For many people, friendships provide the emotional foundation that family relationships cannot. Chosen family and friend networks often offer acceptance, understanding, and connection that feel safer and more authentic. Your presence matters deeply.

Being a supportive friend means showing up consistently while recognizing that you're not responsible for managing their recovery. Listen without judgment when they want to talk, but don't make every conversation about the eating disorder. Maintain the friendship beyond their struggles. Continue doing the things you've always done together when possible, and respect when they need space or aren't ready to engage in certain activities. Ask what they need rather than assuming you know. This could mean being present in silence, or it could mean distracting them with something entirely unrelated to food or treatment.

Boundaries matter in friendships too, even close ones. You can care deeply about someone without taking on the strain of their recovery. You can't fix this for them, and trying to often strains the relationship more than it helps. What you can do is remain steady, check in regularly, and make it clear that your friendship isn't conditional on their progress in treatment.

For more casual relationships such as colleagues or classmates, the dynamics are different. You're likely not in a position to be deeply involved in someone's recovery, and that's appropriate. If you're aware that someone is struggling with an eating disorder or is in treatment, the same basic principles apply: educate yourself enough to understand what eating disorders are, be conscious of the language you use around food and bodies, and treat them with respect and kindness. If you have the bandwidth to offer gentle support or simply be a friendly presence, that can matter. At minimum, do no harm.

Across all of these contexts, a core principle applies: recognize what is yours to carry and what isn't. You can offer love, presence, and support. You cannot control whether someone engages in treatment or how quickly they recover. Holding onto this distinction protects both you and the person you care about.

The Impact of Language

Beyond understanding your specific role, there's deeper work to be done in examining how we all talk about food, bodies, and health. The way we speak reflects and reinforces diet culture, which is fundamentally driven by a multi-billion dollar weight loss industry that profits from making people feel inadequate. While no single factor causes eating disorders, the constant promotion of weight loss, body modification, and rigid food rules creates an environment where disordered behaviors are normalized and even celebrated.

In therapy and treatment, people with eating disorders often work on deconstructing media messages and identifying who stands to profit from promoting these ideals. Supporting someone with an eating disorder means doing this same work yourself. You need to examine your own beliefs and the messaging you've absorbed about what bodies should look like and how people should eat.

"Wellness" has become particularly insidious in recent years, functioning as diet culture with a different vocabulary. It promotes the same rigidity and restriction but frames it as self-care and optimization. The language shifts from "weight loss" to "health," from "diet" to "lifestyle," but the underlying message remains: your body needs to be controlled, food needs to be earned, and constant improvement is the goal. This repackaging makes these ideas even more difficult to recognize and resist.

Not all eating disorders center on weight or involve preoccupation with body shape and size. Conditions like ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder), for example, typically don't involve body image concerns at all. That said, someone with any eating disorder diagnosis might experience self-consciousness about how their body looks, whether from weight loss due to restriction or changes related to malnutrition. Regardless of whether you believe someone's eating disorder involves body image concerns, avoiding certain topics is both respectful and important for creating a healthier environment.

The Importance of Support

Supporting someone with an eating disorder is difficult work, and you won't navigate it perfectly. What matters is your willingness to learn, your commitment to examining your own language and beliefs about food and bodies, and your ability to show up in ways that respect the complexity of these illnesses. The relationship you maintain with this person matters far more than any single conversation or gesture. Keep showing up, keep learning, and recognize that your presence makes a difference even when recovery feels distant or uncertain.