Introduction
Emilie Faure spent years building a glamorous career in high-end art, travelling for art fairs and selling work worth six and seven figures, while privately battling an eating disorder that never once showed up as a single dramatic moment in her therapist's office. It was constant, woven into every hour of an outwardly successful life. That gap, between what recovery actually requires and what a once-a-week appointment can offer, became the founding insight behind Juniver, the company she now leads to rebuild eating disorder treatment from the ground up.
From High-End Art Fairs to a Hidden Battle With Food
Faure's career before Juniver ran through the commercial side of the art world, representing photographers, closing deals with advertising and editorial clients, and later working in roles connected to major institutions. She describes loving the creative, collaborative parts of that work, bringing people together around a shared vision, skills she says translate directly into building a company today.
Beneath that visible success sat an eating disorder that lasted for years, one she managed largely in private while saving up to see a therapist. The disorder wasn't confined to any single difficult moment. It was present in some form nearly constantly, which became central to her later thinking about what real treatment needs to look like.
Why the Gold Standard Treatment Wasn't Working
Once Faure had recovered, she felt strongly that the existing standard of care, typically a weekly cognitive behavioural therapy session with a clinician, wasn't structured for how eating disorders actually behave. She describes the condition as presenting in the brain much like a compulsion or addiction, with urges that are unpredictable and frequently occur exactly when a therapist isn't available.
Her conviction wasn't only personal. Research she encountered showed the gold standard treatment to be only around 30% effective for eating disorders, a gap she saw directly reflected in her own experience and in people around her, both in her immediate circle and more broadly across the art world she was working in.
The Stereotype That's Only a Fraction of the Real Picture
One of Faure's most persistent frustrations is the public image of an eating disorder: a very young, visibly underweight woman. She points out that this presentation, closely tied to anorexia, accounts for a small minority of the overall eating disorder population, with binge eating disorder and bulimia making up the majority of cases and typically presenting in bodies that look, on the surface, entirely ordinary.
That mismatch has real consequences. UK diagnostic and treatment access criteria have historically been closely tied to a low body mass index, which meant Faure herself couldn't access NHS support in London during her own struggle because she wasn't underweight. She's clear that eating disorders also disproportionately affect groups rarely associated with the condition, including men, who make up roughly a quarter of Juniver's user base, plus-size women, and pregnant women, whose hormonal changes can trigger or revive disordered eating.
Building Recovery Tools From Her Own Survival Strategies
Juniver's design draws directly from what actually worked for Faure during her own recovery. A small group of friends who texted one another during triggering moments became the model for the app's community feature, offering both reassurance that she wasn't alone and practical support to move through a difficult moment rather than act on it.
Other strategies built into the product include personal affirmations to repeat during a trigger, and the simple but powerful fact that an urge lasts, on average, around fifteen minutes before it begins to dissipate, however overwhelming it feels at its peak. The app also helps users distinguish between what Faure calls the voice of the eating disorder and the voice of the executive brain, surfacing cognitive distortions in the moment rather than after the fact, and encourages a shift away from black-and-white "good day, bad day" thinking toward the idea that recovery-promoting choices are available hour by hour, not just at the start of a new day.
An AI Trained on Two and a Half Years of Clinical Work
Juniver's in-app companion, Juny, was trained on a curriculum built over two and a half years in partnership with a researcher running an eating disorder neuroscience lab at Mount Sinai. Faure is specific about the clinical guardrails built into it: Juny won't simply comply with an unsafe request, such as reducing a meal plan because a user says they're uncomfortable with the amount, and will instead explain what the body actually needs and offer to break the plan down into something more manageable.
The company is also running formal clinical research in partnership with King's College London, tracking outcomes on the EDE-Q, a recognised clinical assessment scale for eating disorders. Faure notes that many users volunteer for this research specifically because they've experienced a historically neglected condition and want to see the evidence base improve for people coming after them.
The Funding Gap Behind a Neglected Health Crisis
Faure connects the underdevelopment of eating disorder treatment directly to broader patterns in women's health. Clinical research in the US excluded women until 1993, largely because hormonal variation made data collection less convenient, a gap she says still shapes how poorly many treatments and medications are calibrated for female bodies today. Layered on top of that, eating disorder shame and stigma mean people often wait roughly a decade before seeking help, and frequently only speak openly about their experience once they've already recovered.
The funding landscape compounds the problem. Faure cites data showing that roughly 97% of venture funding goes to male founders, meaning the people making investment decisions in this space are, on average, far less likely to have experienced the condition firsthand. \[CHECK\] The specific market size and annual cost figures cited in the episode should be verified against current published sources before publishing, given some ambiguity in the recorded audio.
Self-Compassion, Not Self-Discipline
Asked directly about the role of self-compassion in recovery, Faure calls it essential rather than optional. She describes the internal narration many people direct at themselves during an eating disorder as something they would never say to a friend, and recommends a simple check: would you use this language with someone you love? If not, that gap is worth noticing.
She's firm that punishing self-talk doesn't accelerate recovery. What creates room to feel resilient and empowered, in her account, is treating the eating disorder as a condition that was practised into being over time, not a personal moral failing, which makes it something that can also be gradually undone.
Why She Named the Company Juniver
The name Juniver combines two roots: "juny," an old word for desire from Old Breton in France, and "ver," the Latin word for truth. Faure describes the combination as "desire truth," a direct reference to the sense of disconnection from your authentic self that an eating disorder creates, and the return to that truth that recovery represents.
Her closing message to anyone currently struggling is direct: life on the other side of recovery is dramatically better than it's possible to imagine while still in it, closer, in her words, to living in colour after years of living in black and white.
