As a professional in the field of disordered eating, you understand how important it is to have reliable, practical, and effective resources at your disposal.
Eating disorder worksheets are a fundamental part of your counseling sessions, offering a tangible means for your patients to explore and express their feelings, track their progress, and understand their disorder better.
This blog post will guide you through a diverse collection of both free and paid tools, each curated with the aim of empowering your patients to navigate their journey toward recovery with greater confidence and healing.
Whether you’re a seasoned clinician or a newcomer to the field, these high-quality resources are your Swiss Army Knife of tools to flush out your clinical toolkit. Matching the right tool to your client and their unique needs will contribute significantly to their recovery process (and save you time, to boot).
Let’s dive in!
Disclaimer: As with all articles, this is general information for educational purposes only and not individual advice or recommendations.
The Role of Eating Disorder Worksheets in Counseling and Motivation
Eating disorder worksheets are important in the therapeutic journey, both during your sessions as well as for your clients to use in between your time together. They facilitate reflection, allowing your patients to articulate their feelings, identify triggers, and track their behavioral patterns.
By documenting these feelings and emotions on paper, your clients can gain a clearer understanding of everything that is going on with their eating disorders. High-quality worksheets serve as a tangible barometer of progress, providing you and your patients with a record of their journey and highlighting the strides they have made in their recovery.
The integration of worksheets in the counseling process is not just beneficial, but often integral in the healing journey. Here are our top 15 worksheets!
This insightful tool encourages your clients to delve into the aspects of their eating disorders that are currently a benefit. The goal is to create greater self-awareness and understanding, without shame. This allows you and your client to brainstorm alternative ways to cope, outside of their disordered eating patterns.
Recovery is a journey that requires clear motivation. This worksheet helps your clients to reflect on their personal reasons for recovery and understand what motivates their commitment to overcoming their eating disorder.
Fear of weight gain is a common hurdle many individuals with eating disorders face during their recovery journey. This insightful worksheet is designed to help your clients confront and navigate these fears. By promoting self-reflection and allowing for an open dialogue about these fears, a more balanced perspective on weight and body image is encouraged.
This roadmap provides a structured approach to equip your clients with skills to navigate and overcome the challenges they may encounter during the ups and downs of their process. Your clients will write down their first choice solution for specific situations as well as back up ideas so that they feel more prepared to overcome challenges as they arise. This worksheet is appropriate for use in a 1:1 setting as well as in group counseling sessions.
The Recovery Benchmarking Activity is a simple yet effective framework for self-monitoring. This tool can help your clients to better understand their patterns, recognize early warning signs of relapse, and take helpful action. It’s a practical and intuitive way for your clients to gain awareness of their recovery process ups and downs.
Self-care is a crucial component of recovery, yet it’s something that clients can struggle to prioritize. With this worksheet, your clients have a structured platform to identify and implement self-care practices that are a good match for their personal needs and preferences. As a tool, it emphasizes the importance of nurturing physical, emotional, and mental well-being, reflecting a holistic approach to recovery.
When your patients are in the throes of disordered eating, it can be very difficult to break those patterns. One technique that you and your patients can use is to create “urge cards” that can provide them with a personalized list of things to do instead of bingeing and purging.
While a 3×5 index card is simple, these customized cards are a more stylish template that your clients can fill out and keep with them.
Turning therapeutic activities into a game can be an effective way of engaging clients. The Eating Disorder Recovery Bingo worksheet is a resource that transforms aspects of the recovery journey into a familiar, fun, and interactive format.
Designed with a range of recovery-themed squares, each representing a different goal or achievement, this tool encourages your clients to celebrate their individual victories. Each square ticked off brings them one step closer to a “Bingo,” instilling a sense of accomplishment and progress in their recovery journey.
One of the significant hurdles in recovery from an eating disorder is overcoming rigid and harmful “food rules” that clients may have internalized. The Challenge Food Rules Activity worksheet is a free resource designed to help your clients identify and challenge these rules.
This tool promotes digging deep and encourages clients to discover where their beliefs about food came from. By breaking down these self-imposed rules, this worksheet aids in the crucial process of rebuilding a positive relationship with food. This worksheet is appropriate for individual appointments as well as for use in a group setting.
The path to recovery from an eating disorder often involves replacing disordered behaviors with healthier alternatives. The Alternative Action Form worksheet is a tool that assists your clients in identifying destructive habits linked to their eating disorder and brainstorming healthier behaviors.
This free worksheet promotes self-discovery and reinforces positive change.
Recovery from an eating disorder is a multifaceted process that requires continuous self-reflection and understanding.
This stoplight worksheet is designed to help your client categorize behaviors based on whether they’re constructive or not and to have a plan in place for how to cope when the voice of the eating disorder becomes overpowering. This empowers your patient to formulate a “strategy” on how to persist in their recovery during exceptionally challenging times.
One of the pervasive issues encountered in disordered eating is the overemphasis on body appearance. The Zooming Out: Body Function Over Appearance worksheet offers four pages of prompts to aid your clients in shifting their focus from appearance to the functionality and inherent value of their bodies.
This shift in mindset takes practice but can be a key element in building a positive body image and sustaining long-term recovery.
Transforming negative perceptions about body image is a central aspect of recovery from eating disorders. The Body Image Bundle is an all-encompassing pack of more than 50 eating disorder worksheets and discussion questions designed to guide your clients in addressing and reshaping their attitudes toward their bodies.
Through diverse activities and thought-provoking exercises, this bundle empowers your clients to challenge current beliefs, fostering acceptance and a healthier relationship with their bodies. It serves as a helpful resource to enhance self-esteem and promote body positivity throughout the recovery process. This bundle has it all!
This free worksheet is an opportunity for your clients to take note of the messages that they’ve received about their body and to explore how those messages are impacting them today.
The Body Image Reflections Worksheet is one that can be used again and again throughout treatment.
The Free Disordered Thinking Worksheet is a resource that helps your clients identify and challenge harmful mental patterns. It provides a structured approach to examine these thoughts, understand their root causes, and develop positive responses.
Further Reading and Resources
For more in-depth insights and practical tools regarding eating disorder treatment, we recommend bookmarking the following blog articles right here on WellResourced.
- 50+ Helpful Eating Disorder Resources for Dietitians offers a comprehensive guide for dietitians working with patients with an eating disorder, providing an array of valuable resources and tools.
- The Role of Eating Disorder Meal Plans in Recovery, a valuable blog, provides guidance on creating balanced meal plans that foster healthier eating habits and attitudes toward food.
- Everything You Need to Know About Becoming a CEDRD serves as a professional guide for dietitians seeking advanced certification in the field of eating disorders. It provides a comprehensive overview of the process involved in becoming a certified eating disorder registered dietitian, the benefits of attaining this designation, and how it can enhance your competency and credibility in working with patients with an eating disorder.
- Body Positive Workouts and Fitness Resources is a resource that promotes the integration of physical activity in a manner that celebrates body diversity and encourages self-appreciation. This blog provides valuable tips and guidelines for clinicians to support their clients in adopting a more positive and empowering approach toward exercise that aligns with their recovery goals.
That’s a wrap
As a healthcare professional working in the field of disordered eating, you serve your clients best with a robust set of resources and tools – we’ve got you covered! From insightful blogs to eating disorder worksheets, these resources are designed to support every aspect of treatment and recovery.
We invite you to explore our full library of eating disorder recovery resources at WellResourced. Here, you’ll find a wealth of high-quality tools, including comprehensive worksheets and impactful slide decks, developed with the goal of supporting both clinicians and their clients.
