The Elmira Nutrition Clinic has been recognized regionally and nationally in the treatment of eating disorders and has been treating patients for over 15 years. The goal at the Nutrition Clinic is to help patients understand the nature of their problem and guide them through the painful yet rewarding process of achieving emotional and physician well-being. The clinic is a medically based program with a focus on assisting individuals in making permanent healthy lifestyle changes.

Approximately 80% of college women are currently on or have been on a diet and about 1/3 of these women have an eating disorder. As you will learn in the tour, different personalities lead to varying type of eating disorders. Anorexic behavior, for example, makes people feel more power and control. In bulimic behavior, patients binge to push their feelings down, and then purge to get rid of them. These are patients who are much more in touch with their anger, but use food instead of their voices to express themselves. Compulsive eating is when people eat in conjunction with other distracting activities, such as studying or watching television. This disorder allows people to decrease anxiety.

The clinic offers services that cater to all three of these disorders. The clinic first examines patients using two tests: Metabolic Profile and Body Composition Analysis. The metabolic profile shows how many calories a person is burning at rest, while the body composition analysis measures resistance in cells to show the percentage of fat and protein.

After testing and evaluations are done, the clinicians decide on the best therapy for the patient. The services at the Elmira Nutrition Clinic include: outpatient therapy and part time inpatient therapy. Outpatient counseling services consist of patients meeting with dieticians, therapists, and having a metabolic profile done on a weekly basis. The part time in-patient clinic has patients stay at the clinic Mondays-Fridays from 8:15am – 6:45pm, after which they can go home. For those that live out of town, the Nutrition Center has provided a home, in which the patients can stay in a supervised setting. The outpatient services provided by this clinic are also available at Cornell, in Gannett Health Center, through the Cornell Healthy Eating Program (CHEP).