Want a Healthier Relationship with Food? Get Ready for College with Support

Photo description: The graphic has a bee and hexagons. The title reads “Get ready for college with support”. Underneath the bee, it says “Dr. B specializes in treating eating disorders and building healthy relationships with food and body image”. Below it, her website, phone number, and email are listed.

Being a high school senior preparing to start college can be exciting and also pose its challenges. Potentially moving away from home, leaving high school friends and family behind, and transitioning to something completely new can be scary and intimidating, especially if you are struggling with disordered eating or an eating disorder. Starting this next chapter can bring about excitement, stress, and even confusion about your various roles and losses as you leave your identity of a high school student and begin your college career (Erikson, 1950).

Eating disorders often co-occur with anxiety and disordered eating patterns are prevalent in the general adolescent population (Swanson et al., 2002). Claydon et al. (2025) found that college students who engaged in disordered eating patterns had particular struggles with anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, low distress tolerance, and alcohol problems.

If you are feeling confused, lost, or scared to make decisions about what major to select in college, how to make new friends, how to live alone at the dorms, or how to give yourself permission to eat, this can be, in part, developmentally expected. But you don’t have to prepare to emerge into this new space alone or even wait to start the moment you begin your first college semester! There really is no “perfect” time to start preparing. So why wait when you can begin to prepare your body and mind for this new chapter now?

Therapy can be a safe space to tackle eating disorder struggles by challenging strict food rules, cope with body image dissatisfaction, and explore parts of yourself that can help foster emotional and social growth in various ways. It can also help you process the changes ahead and prepare for this major life transition in ways beyond food and body image. Keep reading to explore some of the benefits of starting therapy as a high school senior.

Ease Anxiety: Receive Body image support

• Are you checking your body in front of the mirror or stepping on the scale daily? Are you trying on or changing clothing because you’re worried about body changes?

• Have you ever wondered what you’d be thinking about if you weren’t obsessed about your body?

• Therapy can help increase self-awareness towards unhealthy thinking patterns that may reinforce disordered eating patterns, such as the examples described above, restricting food intake, bingeing, over-exercising, and/or purging food.

Build Mind-Body Connection: Learn about intuitive eating

• Learn mindful eating strategies to be more connected and present during meals

• Understand possible ways that biological factors, personal traits, and/or your environment can either support healthy eating patterns

Help with Adjusting: Process goodbyes and “bee-ginnings”

• Ending high school and starting college is a season of adjustment

• As you end your high school experience and get ready to embrace your college career, your identity is likely shifting

• Therapy can assist with processing change and possible feelings of grief and loss, joy, excitement, and/or anticipatory anxiety

Connect Well: Explore ways to build meaningful relationships

• Receive support in strengthening connections with others … and yourself

• Increase family support and education on ways to receive and ask for help

Thrive: Handle college hurdles with resilience

• Establish healthy eating patterns that promote mindfulness (i.e. intuitive eating) that can be implemented while adjusting to college life

• Continue to stay connected to the people, hobbies, and routines that have helped you thrive in high school by continuing to prioritize them at college

• Moving away for college while still living in California? Dr. B offers virtual therapy (telehealth/video sessions offered using a HIPAA-compliant portal) to California residents

• Telehealth can be a bridge for college students who are not traveling out of California for school

  About the Author:

  Dr. Tracy Ballardo is a licensed clinical psychologist with over a decade’s experience treating people with eating disorders. She works with children, teens, adults, and families who are seeking help with balancing school/work with others parts of their lives. Dr. B often supports people with treating anxiety, depression, and trauma that often co-occur with eating disorders. Interested in learning more? Let’s connect!

References:

Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton.

Claydon, E.A., Ward, R.M., Geyer, R.B., Weekley, D. (2025). Mapping anxiety symptoms and disordered eating
using the EPSI: a latent profile analysis accounting for peak alcohol use. Journal of Eating Disorders, 13
(96), 4-10.

Swanson, S. A., Crow, S. J., Le Grange, D., Swendsen, J., & Merikangas, K. R. (2011). Prevalence and correlates of
eating disorders in adolescents. Results from the national comorbidity survey replication adolescent
supplement. Archives of General Psychiatry, 68(7), 714–
723. https://doi.org/10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.22