We Know You’re on the Brink
On the brink of burnout, diet rock bottom, and collapse– but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can also be on the brink of transformation, liberation, and peace.
Now is the time to restore joy, ease, and flexibility to your nutrition.
Medical Nutrition Therapy for Eating Disorder Recovery
Your Recovery Starts Now
You might think you need a meal plan and a setpoint weight goal, but what you really need is permission.
Permission to eat food.
Permission to heal on your own terms.
Permission to find freedom.
Your recovery might seem out of sight and impossible, but you do not have to journey this path alone.
You also need support. Together with the other members of your care team such as doctors and mental health professionals, we walk with you side-by-side to create a customized care plan, set nutritional milestones, and monitor your progress toward healing in a way that considers you as a whole human.
We’re here to offer you firm accountability and professional support so you can finally rid your mind and body of chaos, suffering, uncertainty, and guilt.
Our work with clients is therapeutic and long-term. We typically see clients 1-2x/week if stepping down from a higher level of care or starting outpatient treatment for an eating disorder for the first time. Your clinician will give recommendations around the frequency of meetings.
Intuitive Eating and Embodiment Coaching
Diet culture will never be satiated
It’s time that you existed peacefully in your own body. When you’re constantly being served messages that you’re not enough, you need to fix your body, and you don’t measure up, it can be hard to focus on the things in life that really matter. Those messages keep you from living fully, going after big dreams, and showing up as your authentic self.
But you don’t have to carry them any longer. Liberation is yours for the taking.
We’re here to help you discover a new way of existing that doesn’t include self-loathing and obsession with your body. We can help you break free from the oppressive system of diet culture and finally claim your power, peace, and true confidence.
Medical Nutrition Therapy for General Health Issues
Weight-inclusive care for the whole person
There are no health conditions that occur exclusively in people with larger bodies.
Our current healthcare system is weight-centric - many healthcare providers put body weight at the center of notions about health. Not so at On the Brink Nutrition Collective!
We know how to provide Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT) for any disease without prescribing weight loss. Weight-inclusive MNT provides patients the care that they deserve. This is an approach to care that supports clients to feel safe to ask questions, lays the groundwork for undoing aloneness, and helps clients realize they deserve a quality of care they may not have had access to in the past. Weight-inclusive care acknowledges the physiological and psychological trauma people in larger bodies have experienced, often at the hands of healthcare providers.
What to Expect
The initial Intake session involves us getting to know each other. Most often it involves reviewing your medical history, GI concerns, laboratory data you have available, medications, dieting history, and your current relationship with food and movement. This holistic approach includes a thorough examination of the variables that are affecting your whole health. Identifying barriers to change, clarifying values, and examining habits. From there, we can start to set short and long-term goals.
Beyond the initial session, our sessions will include the following themes:
Motivation
Building competency and motivation to change while identifying and caring for resistance. We will consider all “sides” of behavior change. Thinking through the pros and cons (or the “cost” of changing/not changing and the “benefits” of changing/not changing). This activity helps to build insight, confidence, and readiness to change. We’ll create small behavioral change strategies to help you “hang on” to your plan/intention in times of stress or temptation.
Identify triggers
Identify what may cause you to want to restrict or eat past your comfortable fullness and build your toolbox for strategies to help you stay attached to your "today's value system" and not run back to a diet for safety/attachment. Make adjustments to the eating plan. Identify eating style and devise strategies and techniques to move towards physically-connected eating (ie Intuitive Eating).
Make peace with your relationship with food
What it means to have needs and seek pleasure (the deeper work of the "making peace with food" principle of Intuitive eating). Examine your existing diet rules.
Body image and safe embodiment work
Reclaim (or claim for the first time) Body respect and appearance neutrality. Decoding the thought "I Feel Fat". Looking at core beliefs and values that help us to work with your body and not against her. Create strategies to reduce the need for “body checking” behaviors (weighing yourself, grabbing/pinching parts of your body, obsessive/excessive mirror-checking, etc.).
Decoding “Why I eat and don’t eat”
We will trouble the dominant narrative of culture that tells us we should only view food as “fuel” by telling a bigger story about what food and eating means based on your own lived experience.
Creating abundance and accessibility
Creating abundance and accessibility by exploring access to food and community support resources. Focus on planning, shopping, and cooking strategies that support your food and health values within the context of financial budget, skill level, energy level, time budget, and more. Examine the prevalence and impact of such constructs as “Clean” eating, “whole” food, and the moralization of our food choices.
Fee for Services
Session length: 50 minutes
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$200
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$140/session
Support Groups
If one-on-one support isn’t what serves you best at this time, our in-person and virtual support groups are a great way to either begin or continue your journey toward healing.
FAQs
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Absolutely! Even if you don’t have a diagnosed eating disorder, but you feel imprisoned by food rules and restriction, we can help. We want to help you develop confidence in what to eat and eliminate the overwhelming obsession with food and body.
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Our goal is to create an open and inclusive space where you’re welcome and encouraged to bring your full self to the session. We believe that nutrition therapy should be inclusive and equitable, provided through a weight-inclusive, gender-affirming, anti-racist, and anti-oppression approach.
We know that every individual has their own culture, identity, experiences, and inner wisdom that are all relevant to their care. We support you within our expertise while valuing and trusting your self-expertise.
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We offer virtual and in-person sessions. All virtual video calls, either through Simple Practice, our HIPAA-compliant electronic health record.
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If you are a cash-pay client and are seeking help with intuitive eating and body image work, we can provide nutrition coaching for you no matter where you live (any state or country).
If you are seeking nutrition support for a medical or mental health condition such as an eating disorder, heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, or cancer, On the Brink Nutrition Collective clinicians provide Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT) for clients in the states of Arizona only.
MNT is a nutrition-based treatment provided by a registered dietitian nutritionist. It includes a nutrition diagnosis as well as therapeutic and counseling services to help manage medical conditions. This type of care requires coordination with medical and mental health providers. Because of the higher acuity of this type of work, it is our current policy to provide medical nutrition therapy only to residents of Arizona.
If you want to use your insurance to cover the cost of outpatient nutrition counseling, the answer is “it depends.”
Every insurance, whether it’s a national plan or a smaller, regional plan has their own rules and regulations to determine if we (providers in Arizona) can see a client living outside of the state of Arizona. We will need to check the licensure laws of your state and your insurance plan’s benefits and limitations.
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We know that trusting us with your health and well-being is a big deal, and you deserve the safest, quality nutrition care.
You might be surprised to know that there’s actually no standard definition for “nutritionist”!
Registered dietitians/registered dietitian nutritionists, on the other hand, are food and nutrition experts who must meet certain standards to be credentialed to practice.
We must have…
• Completed a Baccalaureate, Master’s, or Doctoral degree in the approved course work at an accredited university
• Completed a competitive and accredited supervised practice program (an internship) typically running six to twelve months in length
• Passed a national examination administered by the Commission on Dietetic Registration (RD or RDN)
• Actively maintain continuing professional education requirements
All of this education and experience means that we can offer you professional, thorough, and safe nutrition support.
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On the Brink is in network with Aetna and United Healthcare. Please read more about insurance here.
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Absolutely! Downloadable PDFs can be found at the links below:
Disclosure Notice Regarding Patient Protections Against Surprise Billing
Right to Receive a Good Faith Estimate of Expected Charges
On the Brink Nutrition Collective is transparent in our service pricing. We are happy to provide clients with Good Faith Estimates and do not engage in balance billing.
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On the Brink Nutrition offers self-payment options. If you don’t have insurance or your insurance doesn’t include coverage for medical nutrition therapy, you will be responsible for the cost of the session (cash-pay rate).
We accept all major credit cards and Health Savings Account (HSA) cards as forms of payment. Services must be paid upfront at the time of service.
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On the Brink Nutrition is a weight-inclusive practice. We don’t prescribe weight loss.
And, we want to extend compassion to you. Of course, you have the desire to lose weight. We live in a fatphobic culture that gives power and privilege to folks in smaller bodies. We want you to know that while we ARE NOT about restrictive diets, we ARE for lifetime dieters who are looking for freedom and liberation from food rules and energy restriction.
We are here for you and support your humanity. We can hold space for your desire to lose weight and process that with you. We want to partner with you for the deeper work around body beliefs and values. Research shows that 95% of diets and intentional weight loss attempts fail in sustained weight loss and increase the risk of a process called "weight cycling" which is harmful to your physical and mental health.
It is the rule, not the exception, that clients come into our practice sharing their lived experience of the vicious cycle of losing and gaining weight. Promoting weight loss through restrictive dieting approaches is not sustainable and encourages eating disorder behaviors. We won’t be a part of that!
Your today’s body is welcome here.
Our team definitely wants to help support you in forming healthier habits with food and finding a sense of well-being. As for weight loss, that is not something we promise will happen from working with us. We can promise to stay curious and caring about your body size, weight, and shape through this healing journey with food.