Therapy for
Recovery from Bulimia is possible
Wherever you are in your journey, a life free from Bulimia is waiting for you.
Congratulations on taking a step towards food freedom and recovery from Bulimia. I know how difficult approaching recovery can be and 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 Bulimia or not.
Rebuild Your Relationship with Food and Your Body
Occasional over-eating is totally normal behaviour. However, binge eating isn’t just over-eating, when someone binge eats, they do not feel able to control their urges to eat.
Through therapy I can help you to explore and rebuild your relationship with food and your body so you can break free from the binge-purge cycle.
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?
What if all the mental energy spent worrying about food and your body could be dedicated to other things?
Bulimia can look different for everyone but there are some common characteristics.
Do any of these sound familiar?
- Eating uncontrollably (binge eating) food and purge and/or compensate via other means such as fasting, restriction, exercise, laxatives or other medication.
- Feeling trapped in a cycle of restriction and binging and feel totally out of control around food
- Using food to cope with difficult emotions
- Preoccupation with food, your weight and body image
- Planning binges/purges
- Your job and relationships are suffering due to your preoccupation with food and body
- Being very restrictive with food, this might impact your social life and relationships too
- Eating secretively and feeling guilt around eating
- Using any means to get access to food to eat during a binge cycle
- You may abuse alcohol or drugs in addition to food
- Self harm
- Low self-esteem
- Tendency towards perfectionism
- Comorbid conditions such depression and OCD
- Promiscuity to mask true feelings
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 Bulimia?
Bulimia is a complex mental illness where someone eats uncontrollably (binges) and makes themselves sick (purges) and/or attempts to compensate via other means such as over-exercising or using laxatives. People with bulimia may find themselves in a vicious cycle of binge/purge episodes.
Eating may be used as a way to cope with difficult emotions or to provide relief in times of stress, and bingeing might feel like numbing or even blacking out. The subsequent purging often leaves the individual feeling ashamed and guilty. People with bulimia can feel distressed and completely out of control around food.
Often people with bulimia manage to hide the symptoms of their eating disorder so it can go undetected for a long time, they maintain a “normal” weight and are frequently high functioning individuals.
Binge eating is not caused by a ‘lack of self control’. Rather, there are often underlying, complex emotional causes.
Approximately 19% of all eating disorders are bulimia
Bulimia is very distressing, it hugely impacts someone’s quality of life and can seriously adversely affect both physical and mental health. Bulimia can affect anyone of any age, gender or background.
You deserve to live a life free from bulimia
Why Work With Me
Bulimia 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 triggers, why you are stuck in the binge-purge cycle and how you can break free from this. Respect, kindness and compassion are integral to the way I work.
Often people with bulimia use binge eating and purging 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.
Often people get stuck in their recovery from bulimia because they think they need to restrict their diet to recover. This is extremely unhelpful as it implies someone just needs more ‘self-control’ or ‘willpower’ to stop binge eating. 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!