Eating issues can show up in lots of different ways. Often eating disorders surface as a way to avoid feelings or experiences. They surface as a means to make life’s challenging emotions less challenging. In these cases people use food to numb emotions, or avoid conflict. Eating disorders are also born out of a desire for acceptance or to be validated. Eating disorders can convince someone that only through weight loss or successful food management and controlling body size will they be “enough”.
Obsession with food and exercise may affect your ability to focus, your moods, and impact your performance at school, work, or in relationships. Food restriction and weight loss can even lead to cognitive impairment, cardiovascular issues, and multiple organ failure.
Let’s work together and discover a kinder, more empowered approach to food, your body, and yourself.
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EATING DISORDERS
THE EXPERIENCE
When you’re living with an eating disorder, there’s not much room for anything else. The obsession with how, when, and what you eat, or don’t eat, takes precedence over everything—your health, your relationships, your hopes, and your dreams. Eating disorders are an all-consuming attack on your body and mind.
Behind every person’s eating struggles is a story not yet told, and emotions not yet discovered or heard. In therapy, you can begin to open up about all of the behaviors, concerns, and feelings that you’d been working hard to hide from others and maybe even from yourself. Opening up takes a lot of courage, but the rewards can be immense as well. You will begin to look at your struggles in a whole new light, and you will acquire new coping strategies to manage your life.
MY APPROACH
Regardless of how disordered eating shows up in your life, my work is to help you understand the cause of your eating disorder. We work to process what is underneath the eating disorder, and build skills to manage life’s challenges without the use of food. Once we do this I often see people become less and less focused on food. They begin to enjoy eating food more freely without the desire to restrict. Or they stop using food as a way to avoid their feelings.
The parallel focus is on understanding the connection between food and feelings and developing value based coping mechanisms with emotions which are often the triggers to disordered eating practices and working toward fostering a new way of relating to oneself and one’s body based on self-acceptance and self-compassion. This opens the door to an unfolding process of self-discovery, leading to greater awareness and acceptance of emotions, improved assertiveness in relationships and effectiveness in coping with stressful life situations.
I utilize The Health At Every Size approach in working with adults and adolescents with emotional eating and binge-eating issues. This is a non-diet approach that focuses on stopping the vicious diet-binge cycle and the yo-yo weight loss and regain phenomenon that we have all been so familiar with as part of our current diet culture.
In part, because eating disorders are complex conditions, involving biological, psychological and societal elements. As the combined effect of these elements naturally varies from one individual to another, I offer personalized treatment to cater to an individual’s unique situation, and give them the best chance of recovery.
