After an eating disorder nearly ended her life, Chelsea Roff started
Eat Breathe Thrive to ensure all people have support to recover from eating disorders.
A Non-Profit Born From Lived Experience
Eat Breathe Thrive began as a deeply personal mission to change how we understand and support people with eating disorders. Our founder, Chelsea Roff, had lived experience of the illness and saw early on that while treatment is life-saving, it often leaves gaps — especially in helping individuals reconnect with their bodies and sustain recovery outside the treatment setting.
Relapse is common in eating disorders — not due to lack of motivation, but because applying therapeutic progress in everyday life is difficult without continued support. Chelsea saw the need for a model to bridge that gap: one that helps people rebuild their relationship with food and body, carry insights from treatment into daily life, and strengthen the emotional and relational skills needed for long-term recovery. Not as a replacement for treatment, but as an extension of it — grounded in embodied practice, experiential skill building, and peer support.
Years after she recovered, Chelsea returned to the treatment center where she had once been a patient — this time as a professional. That visit led to the development of a group intervention to support people in recovery, first piloted with treatment centers and later manualized into a structured intervention. It became the foundation of Eat Breathe Thrive: a model that integrates embodiment practices, experiential skills, and peer support.
Since its founding in 2013, Eat Breathe Thrive has grown into an international nonprofit delivering eating disorder prevention and recovery programs across clinical, educational, and community settings. We’ve collaborated with academic researchers on four peer-reviewed studies evaluating the effectiveness of the Eat Breathe Thrive interventions, including two multisite randomized controlled trials. Under Chelsea’s leadership, the organization has reached over 17,000 people in 58 countries, working with schools, treatment centers, and underserved communities—from Cameroon to Brazil.
Watch how Chelsea’s ambitious crowdfunding campaign helped kickstart Eat Breathe Thrive.
How A Rooftop Campaign Launched Eat Breathe Thrive
In 2013, Chelsea quit her job and launched a crowdfunding campaign. The goal? To raise $50,000 to start a nonprofit organization, under the umbrella of the Give Back Yoga Foundation
44 days into the 50-day campaign, the campaign was at $19k—a lot of money, but not enough to start an organization. Chelsea knew it was time to do something drastic, or the campaign would fail.
So, she climbed onto a roof on Main Street in Santa Monica, set down a yoga mat, and vowed to remain on that mat until the rest of the funds were raised! For five days, Chelsea held the widely-publicized rooftop yoga strike, #OccupyYouAreBeautiful... until the campaign finally reached $50,000—and so, this organization was born.
From Personal Healing To Global Impact
A decade since its inception, Eat Breathe Thrive has helped over ten thousand people across forty-two countries on their path to recovery. Under Chelsea's direction, Eat Breathe Thrive programs have achieved recognition and validity, backed by four separate scientific studies, including two randomized controlled trials.