- Our services
- Community, Youth and Child Services
- Eating Awareness Team
Eating Awareness Team
Welcome to Waipuna
We provide a service for people over 16 years old experiencing mild to moderate severity of disordered eating and wanting to improve a dysfunctional relationship with food and low body image. We focus on health promotion, and early identification and prevention of eating disorders.
Our Services
- Individual counselling
- Guided-self-help
- Small group therapy
We invite you to feel at home in our weight inclusive and non-judgmental environment. Our holistic non-diet approach promotes peaceful eating, enjoyable movement and lifestyle, and respect for body shapes, sizes, colors, genders, and abilities. We work with you to develop sustainable behavior changes while putting an end to self-destructive eating patterns and perpetual cycles that keep you feeling stuck.
Disordered eating may include:
Repetitive diet plans, food restriction, deprivation, or daytime fasting; cutting out specific foods or food groups; compulsive, emotional or binge eating; food anxiety, avoiding social meals, irregular or inflexible eating.
Wellness, not weight
We live in a diet culture that can be harmful to our body image, endorsing unrealistic body ideals. Your body is not wrong, and it is not a problem to be fixed. Health can exist on a spectrum of body sizes, which will vary with time and circumstance for every individual. Our aim for you is health gain and improved quality of life. If it is right for your body weight loss could be a side effect of change, but it is not always necessary and is never the primary goal.
Developing a positive relationship with food and body
This relationship has developed over your lifetime and is the outcome of conditioning from many influencing factors. Developing awareness of thoughts, feelings and actions is part of the journey for re-learning how to eat, re-connect, and treat your body with dignity and respect. Combining meal structure and planning with psychological flexibility allows you to enjoy regular, adequate, balanced, and enjoyable meals – socially or alone without anxiety or guilt gate-tripping your experience.
Components of our care
- Psychoeducation
- Food and nutrition management
- Intuitive eating counselling
- Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT-e)
- Acceptance and Commitment therapy
- Mindfulness and distress tolerance
- Compassion-focused therapy
E.A.T. sessions involve:
Our sessions address origins and maintaining factors of the disordered eating. They support clients to understand their problem triggers and barriers to change, and build skills to identify, address, and manage emotional dysregulation, unhelpful thought patterns and behaviors, as well as brainstorm solutions and plan ahead in a collaborative and strengths-based way.
Refer to us
Our service for people aged 16-64 years. If you are referring for someone who is 15 and younger, or 65 and older, please contact your Health Practitioner/GP.
More information
Tel: 03 386 2159
Email: [email protected]