Therapy for
Recovery from Binge Eating Disorder is possible
Wherever you are in your journey, a life free from Binge Eating is waiting for you.
Congratulations on taking a step towards food freedom and recovery from disordered eating. I know how difficult approaching recovery can be, it takes a lot of courage! You may have mixed feelings about addressing your eating disorder, you might look forward to dealing with the problem but also have concerns about what treatment will entail. Maybe you feel guilt or shame associated with your eating issues.
However long you have spent struggling, recovery is possible. Help is here whether you have been officially diagnosed with Binge Eating Disorder or not.
Rebuild Your Relationship with Food and Your Body
Occasional over-eating is totally normal behaviour. However, Binge Eating Disorder (BED) isn’t just over-eating, when someone has BED they do not feel able to control their urges to eat.
Do you wish you didn’t have to worry about everything that you eat?
Would you love to be able to deal with difficult emotions without turning to food?
Through therapy I can help you to explore and rebuild your relationship with food and your body so you can stop feeling so out of control around food.
Binge Eating Disorder can look different for everyone but there are some common characteristics.
Do any of these sound familiar?
- Consuming a lot of food very hurriedly in a short space of time
- You may diet or restrict between binges. Perhaps you find yourself in an endless ‘diet starts tomorrow’ mentality.
- When you eat ‘off diet plan’ you give up on restriction and this can send you into a full-on binge
- Being in a ‘trance-like’ state when binge eating
- You binge on food to the extent it can be extremely painful
- You are pre-occupied with thoughts of food and weight, maybe even your relationships and job are suffering
- Your weight might fluctuate a lot in a short space of time, you might be ‘overweight’ but not necessarily
- You eat secretively due to shame or embarrassment around your eating habits, you might hide wrappers or food packaging
- You will use any means to get access to food to eat during a binge
- You experience comorbid conditions such depression and OCD
Only 6% of people with eating disorders are underweight, whatever weight you are does not minimise your experience or your need for treatment ♥️
What is Binge Eating Disorder?
People with BED eat large quantities of food but they do not engage in compensatory behaviours like purging, but they may restrict or try to restrict after a binge. There is often a lot of guilt and shame attached to binge eating which can trap people with BED in the cycle of the illness. For people living with BED, eating during a binge feels uncontrolled and impulsive, it is often an emotional response where eating is used to self-soothe.
You are by no means alone, Binge Eating Disorder is one of the most common eating disorders Approximately 22% of all eating disorder diagnoses are binge eating disorder (Hay et al., 2017)
People with BED are often high-functioning and may well maintain a weight within the ‘normal’ range, so the illness can go undetected. Additionally, unhelpful stereotypes persist and lead many to dismiss or minimize their experience. Binge eating disorder is not caused by a ‘lack of self control’. Rather, there are often underlying, complex emotional causes.
Binge eating can be very distressing, it hugely impacts someone’s quality of life and can seriously adversely affect both physical and mental health.
You deserve to live a life free of binge eating disorder
Why Work With Me
BED is not just about food, the underlying causes are emotional, this is why therapy is so important for recovery. In working together we will address the individual root causes of your eating problem. We will understand your binge triggers, why you binge eat and how you can break free from the binge eating and restriction cycle. Respect, kindness and compassion are integral to the way I work.
Often people with BED use binge eating to cope with difficult or overwhelming emotions, in therapy we will identify and work through these feelings and find healthy ways for you to cope instead of turning to food. We will address any co-occuring conditions, such as anxiety, which may feed into your eating disorder.
Living at peace with your body doesn’t need to be so exhausting and time consuming
We will also use tools to help address immediate concerns you may have around food and body image and help to decrease the distress you are feeling right now. This might include practical steps such as looking at your food routines, noticing behaviours such as body checking and thinking about boundaries you can implement.
One of the biggest misconceptions about recovery from binge eating is that someone needs to restrict their diet more to recover. This is extremely unhelpful as it implies someone just needs more ‘self-control’ or ‘willpower’. As well as making an individual feel like a failure or like they need to ‘try harder’, restriction will also just worsen binge eating! In actual fact it is so important that you are eating enough so you are not feeling deprived as deprivation drives binge urges. To help you get in touch with your own natural appetite I incorporate the principles of intuitive eating in our work together. It’s also crucial to acknowledge the toxic role of diet culture in our society.
Unfortunately diet culture has normalized disordered behaviors around food such as restriction or trying to ‘compensate’ for eating through exercise. The latest new fad diets are disguised as ‘wellness plans’ or ‘lifestyle changes’ but they are what they always were, restrictive diets, which do not result in lasting weight loss, in fact usually the opposite, and furthermore often cause a deal of psychological and even physiological damage. Meanwhile exercise is praised at all costs with little discussion of the importance or benefits of rest.
Getting to a healthy body doesn’t involve dieting, food restriction or bingeing!