The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

Welcome to Raising Good Humans podcast.

I'm Dr. Lisa Pressman, and today's episode I'm talking with Dr. Aaron Parks, who's a clinical psychologist, researcher, and co-founder of Equip.

Dr. Parks has over 15 years of experience working with adolescents and adults in various

eating disorder treatment settings. And then she co-founded Equip and is on faculty in the

Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego. This is a really helpful episode to learn about eating disorders, when to worry, when to

not worry, things that you can do for prevention, signs to look for. And we're talking about

the range of eating disorders from anorexia, binge eating, and also things like ARFID,

which are a little bit less known, more than picky eating. It's a serious food restriction.

I wanted to talk with Dr. Aaron about ways that parents can support their kids, set up healthy eating in the house

and body images, and also when to worry and what to do about it. So I want to start with the basics.

I want to sort of calibrate. So we're all talking about the same thing. When we talk about

eating disorders, what are we talking about? Such a great question. Eating disorders is actually an umbrella term,

and there are about 10 different diagnoses that fall under that umbrella. The first one is

ARFID. It's an acronym that stands for avoidant, restrictive food intake disorder. And you can kind

to think about it as picky eating

gone awry. This usually starts around toddlerhood. And these are kids who will grow into adults

who have extreme picky eating. And this picky eating either impacts them physically. So we will

sometimes see a 10 year old who weighs the same as when they were six, or it impacts them

socially. It's hard for them to go out to a restaurant or be at a party that's serving food

because there's so few foods that they eat. So that is one diagnosis. Another diagnosis is

anorexia. I think this is what most people think about. I would say this is like the Hollywood

...