Eating Disorder Therapy
Women, Are You Ready For A Healthier Relationship With Food?
Is low self-esteem or a distorted view of your weight or body size driving you toward unhealthy eating patterns? Do you find yourself helplessly turning to food in order to cope with stress, loneliness, fear, or other negative feelings?
Perhaps you exercise, count calories, or avoid certain foods religiously because you’re endlessly striving for a certain weight, dress size, or figure.
Or maybe you grew up in a household where food functioned as a kind of reward, which was great then, but now, you lack the boundaries to say when enough is enough.
Disordered Eating Can Look Different For Everyone
On an emotional level, you may cry a lot or feel anxious, moody, frustrated, or quick to anger. Physically, you might be losing hair, dropping or gaining weight quickly, or feeling weak and tired all the time.
You’re probably so careful with what and how much you eat when you go out with friends that it sucks the fun right out of the experience. Or you might have a stressful relationship with food because you’re constantly distracted by small obsessions, like eating with a special utensil, using a plate of a certain size, or only eating foods of a certain color.
Nutrition is an essential part of our lives—and we deserve to enjoy a stress-free relationship with it that isn’t bound by stringent rules and expectations for beauty. So whether you’re struggling with yo-yo dieting, poor body image, or disordered eating behaviors, Key Counseling Group wants to help you develop a healthier, more intuitive relationship with food.
As Women, Our Relationship With Food Can Be Overly Complicated
Most of us grew up immersed in an unforgiving diet culture that enforces weight stigma while promoting the “thin ideal.” Manufactured expectations for beauty and the perfect body size have long been fueled by advertising companies, photoshopped celebrities, and social media filters that entice us to judge ourselves according to impossible standards.
As a result, many of us grew up looking at ourselves as flawed in some crucial way. In fact, 86 percent of women experience dissatisfaction with their bodies. That’s a huge number! So it’s no wonder that we are constantly looking at our weight and waist size, counting carbs, and judging our appearance.
Our Relationship With Food Is Often Driven By A Desire For Comfort Or Control
Some disordered eating, like bulimia or anorexia, can act as a defense mechanism that gives people a sense of control over their bodies. The need to feel attractive or be at peak physical fitness for careers or relationships can lead to excessive exercising, dieting, and food avoidance.
CEOs and high-achievers who feel like they have to control everything often just want to lose control of something, so they choose the seemingly lesser of many evils: food. Other women—exhausted from the stress of working, raising kids, and being a good partner—self-soothe with comfort foods in a way that, sometimes, gets out of hand.
The truth is: we all want to feel attractive, loved, and special, but happiness doesn’t come from being skinny. It comes from healing and learning to love yourself in a way that frees you from self-judgment, expectations, and the need to change who you are—and that’s what eating disorder counseling is all about.
Therapy for Disordered Eating Can Transform Your Relationship With Food
Almost everyone is familiar with the experience of yo-yo dieting, gaining unwanted weight, and wanting to look better. However, eating disorder therapy enables you to break free from diet culture and teaches you how to approach eating, exercise, and every other aspect of life mindfully and intuitively.
It also gives you a safe space to explore negative thoughts about food, your body, or your self-worth. More importantly, it offers you a chance to safely process and heal underlying trauma at the root of some of these thoughts. Therapy can also explain why certain negative coping mechanisms developed while equipping you with new coping skills that are healthier and more effective.
What Does Eating Disorder Treatment Involve?
Ultimately, we want to teach you about the importance of eating in a healthier way, whether that means eating regularly, being intuitive about your food, not restricting or binging, etc.
However, we also want to explore how dieting habits were learned and where negative thoughts about your body and food came from. While we are doing that deeper work of exploration and healing, we’ll also talk about your current symptoms, how they’re affecting your life, and what you want your future to look like.
In the short term, we’ll help you develop solutions for managing symptoms and living intuitively so that things like clothing size and other people’s appearance don’t affect you as much. In the long run, you can break free from diet culture, maintain a healthier lifestyle, and learn how to truly and fully love yourself.
How We’ll Create A Dynamic Eating Disorder Treatment Plan For You
Disordered eating patterns can be wide-ranging, so we often use a combination of evidence-based tools and solution-focused strategies in the healing process:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT for eating disorders) allows you to reframe negative beliefs and change harmful behaviors related to food, dieting, and body image.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a strategy for understanding your own values, how they currently align (or do not align) with your life, and what you can do to change that.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (or DBT for Eating Disorders) focuses on mindfulness, emotional regulation, interpersonal skills, and increasing your tolerance to triggers.
We understand the need to look good and be on top of your game, but you can still do that while enjoying a natural, healthy relationship with food. You don’t have to constantly worry about your weight or size, what you’re eating, or how many calories you’ve had in a day. Learning to appreciate life outside of these limitations is so much more peaceful and rewarding.
Key Counseling Group wants you to know that it is possible to recover from an eating disorder. With our help, you can have more energy, improve your relationships, and discover newfound interest in life and what lies ahead.
Perhaps You’re Considering Eating Disorder Therapy, But Still Have Some Concerns…
I’m worried about what my body will look like if this works.
There’s a chance that your appearance may change while healing your relationships with food and your body. Our bodies are meant to change. It’s inevitable. So part of the therapeutic process is learning to accept that evolution and understand why it can be such a positive force for improving your life.
That said, we also realize that we’re not doing you any favors if you leave here feeling worse about yourself. In the end, you’re the expert on yourself and you know what makes you happy, so you get to decide which direction therapy takes.
My partner/family thinks eating disorder therapy will make me gain weight.
It’s possible that certain people in your life may also be a victim of our society’s “thin ideal” culture and they’re unknowingly promoting and encouraging disordered eating behaviors. However, the changes that come with recovering and healing will bring so much more happiness to your life that those around you may change their minds over time.
If not, we can work on processing that experience and developing ways to deal with their negativity. We can even open up sessions to provide them with psychoeducation on why therapy is so important.
I’m not sure eating disorder therapy is worth the money.
Eating disorders are the 2nd most deadly mental health disorder, which means your overall well-being may be at stake. Whether it involves bulimia, anorexia, food addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or any other disordered eating behaviors, treatment can bring so much more happiness and peace into your life. That kind of healing and transformation is priceless.
You Can Have A Healthy, Intuitive Relationship With Food
If food addiction, yo-yo dieting, poor body image, or disordered eating behaviors are having a negative impact on your life, our empathetic therapists at Key Counseling Group want to help. Please call 678-400-9477 for your free, 20-minute consultation to see how our eating disorder counselors can improve your relationship with food.
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