Therapy for
Recovery from Disordered Eating is Possible
Wherever you are in your journey, a life free from food and body issues is waiting for you.
Congratulations on taking a step towards food freedom. I know how difficult approaching recovery can be, it takes a lot of courage! You may have mixed feelings about addressing your eating issues, you might look forward to dealing with the problem but also have concerns about what treatment will entail, worried about challenging your food rules and what will happen. 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 an eating disorder or not.
Rebuild Your Relationship with Food and Your Body
Not all abnormal eating patterns can be clinically diagnosed as an eating disorder, in this instance we refer to ‘disordered eating’ rather than an ‘eating disorder’. Someone with disordered eating may exhibit some characteristics of an eating disorder but they may not appear with the frequency or severity to receive a clinical diagnosis.
A term used when someone is obsessed with eating only healthy or ‘pure’ foods is Orthorexia.
When someone has had an eating disorder and is in recovery they may find themselves in state of ‘quasi-recovery’. Maybe you no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for the illness, you may have improved a lot and look like you have fully recovered from your eating disorder. However, on the inside you still obsess about foods, feel guilt around eating, and may feel unable to let go of all eating disorder behaviors, such as restriction and/or exercising to compensate for food eaten.
Any type of disordered eating can be very distressing, and can hugely impacts someone’s quality of life and adversely affect both physical and mental health.
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?
Through therapy I can help you to explore and rebuild your relationship with food and your body.
Do any of these sound familiar?
- You engage in restriction, binging or purging irregularly
- You use food, whether binging, purging or restriction, to cope with difficult or overwhelming emotions
- You avoid major food groups
- You are obsessed with the nutritional quality of food
- You eat in planned and regimented way and lack intuitive eating
- You prioritise ‘healthy eating’ over most other things in your life, including work, relationships, family and social events
- An obsessive interest in food based social media pages and in what others are eating
- You feel like you’re ‘one foot in and one foot out’ of your eating disorder
- Your self worth is tied up in how well you feel you are eating and following your diet
- You may have body image concerns
- You fear gaining weight
Remember, whatever weight you are does not minimise your experience or your need for treatment ♥️
What is Disordered Eating?
People with disordered eating have abnormal eating behaviours that occur regularly but not frequently or severely enough to be diagnosed an an eating disorder. Not everyone who has disordered eating develops an eating disorder however disordered eating can become an eating disorder if not addressed.
Orthorexia could be classed as a specific type of disordered eating since it is not a clinically recognised diagnosis
People with orthorexia have a concern for and awareness of the nutritional quality and content of food taken to the extreme. As with other eating disorders Orthorexia can be driven by a need for control or to achieve ‘perfection’ which in turn may be a way that people can cope with emotional distress. Food and the pursuit of health is used as a coping mechanism to deal with difficult or overwhelming emotions and obsession with food may act as a way to negate or interrupt your feelings. In orthorexia what often begins as a seemingly innocent desire to lead a healthier lifestyle transforms into unhealthy obsessive thoughts.
It could also be the case that you are recovering from an eating disorder and find yourself no longer with a clinically diagnosable eating disorder but you know something still isn’t quite right with your food and/or exercise habits. You may not have found the freedom with food and movement that you were hoping for when embarking on eating disorder recovery.
Or it may be that you have another type of food, exercise or body image struggles that aren’t represented here. That’s ok, everyone experience and relationship with food and their body is unique.
You deserve to live a life free from disordered eating
Why Work With Me
Disordered Eating 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 find yourself worrying about food and your body and how you can break free from this. Respect, kindness and compassion are integral to the way I work.
Often people use exercise, binge eating, restriction or purging (or all of these!) 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 issues.
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 hurdles in recovery from disordered eating is letting go of restriction in their diet. Restriction is extremely unhelpful as it gets people stuck in a restrict-binge cycle! 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!