Is eating is dominating your thoughts and do you struggle constantly to control your weight? Maybe you obsess about your shape and find yourself hating your own body, or you have strict rules around what you should and should not eat? Then you may be harming your body and well being on many levels.
At LifeChange we take a holistic, psychological and personalised approach to the effective treatment of eating disorders. Eating disorders are chronic, debilitating and harmful to the individual, and are undergirded by deeper unconscious emotional issues around fear, anxiety, worthlessness and guilt. Not all sufferers with a difficult relationship with food fit neatly under the eating disorder label. We can all suffer to some degree. Some people, who abuse food or who misuse food in harmful ways, are in denial to how serious the problem actually is.
Eating disorders are embedded in the person’s sense of self, with the individual demonstrating a pathological need to control in order to feel safe and secure in their lives. Eating disorders are progressive and the more sufferers find the need to control, the more they are trying to feel safe and create a secure base within themselves. Repressing emotions and dealing with life’s difficulties through food controlling actually means that we miss out on emotionally processing our lives. The work of psychotherapy is to process the underlying painful emotions within the context of a secure base in the psychotherapeutic setting. Recovery involves supporting the sufferer to understand why the eating disorder emerged in the first place; facilitating new ways of coping and ultimately nourishing the self. Your therapist at LifeChange will support and help you to look at this from three levels:
Behaviours
• Do I weigh and measure my body constantly?
• Do daily count calories of every thing I eat?
• Do I eat normally in front of others but binge in secret?
• Do I vomit or use laxatives to control my weight?
• Do I keep on eating even though I’ve had enough?
• Do I starve myself for fear that if I start eating I may never stop?
• Do I use and abuse slimming pills or other meds to lose weight?
• Do I exercise compulsively?
Thoughts & Cognitions
• Do you think about food, eating and your body constantly?
• Do you find yourself obsessively ruminating on everything you eat?
• Do you have negative thoughts around your body and your eating habits?
• Do you constantly compare your body shape and physique to others?
• Do you have strict rules and rituals around what you eat and don’t eat?
Emotions & Feelings
• Do you feel fat and disgusting even when others are worried that you are too thin?
• Do your suffer from guilt and worthlessness when you eat something “bad”?
• Do you feel self-hatred and loathing when you look in the mirror?
• Are you scared to eat normally?
• Do you feel out of control and anxious if you don’t stick to your diet rigidly?
• Beat Compulsive Eating & Bingeing
• Anorexia Treatment
• Bulimia Help
• Binge Eating
For Further Information and helplines…
Contact Bodywhys