How an Eating Disorder Sufferer, Turned Researcher Started Eat Breathe Thrive
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Chelsea Roff is the Founder and Director of Eat Breathe Thrive, a Give Back Yoga Legacy Program that works to prevent and help people overcome eating disorders through yoga.
Chelsea began her career studying yoga as a researcher in a psychoneuroimmunology laboratory. But she always felt a call to work with people with eating disorders -- as a young person, anorexia had nearly taken her life, and she knew how powerful the practice could be in recovery. In 2013, she raised fifty thousand dollars to kickstart Eat Breathe Thrive and develop a yoga-based curriculum for eating disorder recovery. In the years since, she's brought the program to scale in thirty-two U.S. states and seven countries and worked alongside Dr. Catherine Cook Cottone to conduct four studies on its efficacy. Chelsea also serves as Executive Director of the Give Back Yoga Foundation UK, where she is working to bring our legacy programs to scale in the National Healthcare System.
In this 45-minute interview, we’ll cover:
Chelsea began her career studying yoga as a researcher in a psychoneuroimmunology laboratory. But she always felt a call to work with people with eating disorders -- as a young person, anorexia had nearly taken her life, and she knew how powerful the practice could be in recovery. In 2013, she raised fifty thousand dollars to kickstart Eat Breathe Thrive and develop a yoga-based curriculum for eating disorder recovery. In the years since, she's brought the program to scale in thirty-two U.S. states and seven countries and worked alongside Dr. Catherine Cook Cottone to conduct four studies on its efficacy. Chelsea also serves as Executive Director of the Give Back Yoga Foundation UK, where she is working to bring our legacy programs to scale in the National Healthcare System.
In this 45-minute interview, we’ll cover:
- The origin story: how the Eat Breathe Thrive was started and what the early years were like
- How the organization’s mission, work, and programs have evolved over the years
- The vision: where the organization is going, and how it plans to get there
This interview will be hosted by Rob Schware, Executive Director of the Give Back Yoga Foundation.
More Inaugural Week Interviews:
- How Volunteering with Veterans Launched Mindful Yoga Therapy, an origin story interview with Suzanne Manafort
- How The Prison Yoga Project Was Started, an origin story interview with James Fox
- How a Yoga Teacher and Her Student Started the Give Back Yoga Foundation, an origin story interview with Beryl Bender Birch and Rob Schware
- How a Disease That Nearly Took Her Breath Away Inspired yoga4cancer, an origin story interview with Tari Prinster
- How a Relapse Helped to Launch Yoga of 12-Step Recovery, an origin story interview with Nikki Myers
A Note on Seva (Service):
Many of our faculty donate their time and receive no compensation from course fees. The funds we raise through this platform go to support Give Back Yoga Foundation and its key initiatives: mat donations, small grants, and not-for-profit yoga programs for people facing addiction, eating disorders, cancer, incarceration, and PTSD. Learn more about our work here.