Eating disorders are severe mental disorders that significantly impact a person’s emotional well-being, physical health, and everyday functioning. All eating disorders are characterized by disturbances in eating behavior and food-related attitudes. Furthermore, some eating disorders, such as bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa, are characterized by negative attitudes about one’s body (i.e., body image). In fact, negative body image is one of the strongest predictors of these disorders and contributes to their maintenance and risk of relapse. Therefore, investigating effective treatments to improve body image among people with an eating disorder is a priority.

To this end, my colleagues and I at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands investigated a relatively new treatment approach for adolescent girls with an eating disorder: Could focusing on all of the valuable things their body can do (rather than how it looks) lead to improvements in body image?

To test this, we drew from an intervention called Expand Your Horizon. Expand Your Horizon was originally developed as a three-session online intervention, in which participants focus on their body functionality (i.e., everything their body can do). Namely, participants are asked to describe all of the valuable things their body can do, across various "domains" such as bodily senses (e.g., sight), creative........

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