Halifax hospital incorporates food preparation, cooking in eating disorder treatment

The kitchen is often referred to as the heart of the home and that's no different at the QEII Health Sciences Centre Eating Disorders Clinic.

“The kitchen is really important because we practice what we preach,” says Dr. Yvette Scattalon.

Scattalon is a psychologist at the clinic, which mostly treats people living with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

“For certain folks, they may not have eaten certain foods in a long time, so we help re-introduce foods that they may have felt are quite scary,” says Scattalon.

Psychologist Dr. Cheryl Aubie says the kitchen plays a crucial role in helping patients develop a healthy relationship with food.

“Often times when people have an eating disorder for a really long time, how they feel about food has changed a lot and they often have a lot of difficulty eating normal meals,” says Aubie. 

Patients are involved in all aspects of the meals in the Eating Disorders Clinic kitchen.

“We do meal preparation, our patients actually help plan the meals here, they do a lot of the cooking and the staff sits and eats meals with the patients,” says Aubie.

“And then focusing on and managing the emotions afterwards,” says Scattalon.

Dr. Scattalon says understanding these emotions is an important step in recovery.

“Some folks may think that eating disorders are just about eating and body image and weight, but we know that although important, there's another piece and that's the underlying emotional issues that actually drive the eating disorder behaviors,” says Scattalon.

The clinic offers three different levels of treatment - an inpatient program, a transitional day patient program, and an intensive outpatient program.

All three include group therapy and depend heavily on the kitchen.    

“Often times they will say it's one of the most difficult parts of treatment at the beginning, but they really come to appreciate it's a necessary part of treatment to learn how to be comfortable with a wide variety of foods again,” says Aubie.

“By the end of it they know what normal eating looks like and they might even start to like food again and have more positive feelings around the whole eating context,” says Scattalon.

The QEII Eating Disorders Clinic requires a referral from a family physician and the wait time for assessment is usually between four and six weeks.