Eating Disorder Treatment San Diego, CA
Has Disordered Eating Taken Over Your Life?
Are you consumed by your relationship with food? Is excessive preoccupation with diet restriction, calorie counting, or binge eating and purging causing you physical distress and emotional torment? Have you tried to control your urges on your own without success and looking for a long-term solution?
Perhaps whenever you consider what, when, and how much you should eat, you become anxious and overwhelmed. Fearing you may lose control and gain weight without strict oversight, you might impose rigid rules and restrictions on your diet.
If you engage in binge eating, you may have difficulty controlling your urge to eat, filling up with food until you feel sick. When you break your dietary rules this way, you may make up for it by purging with laxatives, vomiting, or performing excessive exercise. Your binge eating and purging cycles may be in reaction to negative emotions or after an extended period of food restriction.
You May Be Experiencing Physical Fallout
If you’re depriving yourself of healthy nutrition, you might feel weak or dizzy most of the time. Your disordered eating habits could also be leading to insomnia, fatigue, and brain fog that leaves you listless and disengaged. Further, if your digestion has been affected, you may be prone to constipation or find that your body’s hunger and fullness cues are no longer reliable.
In addition to the physical ramifications, your self-worth may be tied to your appearance. When you’re not at your ideal weight, you may feel ashamed and depressed. Lacking the confidence to feel good about your body, perhaps you self-isolate and, in turn, become more focused on controlling your weight than before.
The good news is that eating disorder therapy can help you become less obsessed with food and weight while still feeling in control of your life. With treatment, you can learn how to address such disorders as Bulimia Nervosa (BN), Binge Eating Disorder (BED), and Anorexia Nervosa (AN) so that food-related thoughts and behaviors lose their dominance over you.
At Their Worst, Eating Disorders Can Be Life-Threatening
It may come as a surprise that “eating disorders affect at least 9 percent of the population worldwide.” This equates to an estimated 28.8 million Americans who will have an eating disorder at some point in their lifetime. What’s most troubling is that due to the physical injury they have the potential of inflicting, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness.
Disorders such as BN and BED can have devastating consequences on our lives. We may turn to food for comfort or escape from difficult emotions only to find that the subsequent guilt we experience causes us to purge.
Our Image-Obsessed Culture Only Exacerbates The Problem
Living in a society that assigns such a high value to how we look often contributes to eating disorders. Not only are the images that we are exposed to unrealistic, but so are the notions that with the right exercise routine or diet we can have the perfect body. In reaction to these influences, we often set unattainable weight goals for ourselves. When we fall short, our relationship with food and our bodies suffers.
We may avoid therapy for our eating disorder due to shame over the thoughts and behaviors we’re experiencing. Although it’s extremely difficult for us to control our urges to restrict our diet or binge, we are embarrassed to share our struggles with others. We wish we could figure out how to spend less time thinking about food and calories but don’t know where to start.
Fortunately, eating disorder therapy offers you the tools necessary to liberate yourself from obsessive food-related thoughts and behaviors. Studies have shown that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can be an effective treatment for eating disorders.
Eating Disorder Therapy Can Improve Your Relationship With Food And Diet
An eating disorder affects you physically, mentally, and emotionally. Trying to address its deep-seated effects without professional help can be difficult, if not impossible. Working with a therapist who is trained in the treatment of eating disorders and food addiction offers you tangible tools that can help you alter your negative thoughts and behaviors related to food and weight and stop the cycle of shame.
Therapy provides you with a safe space to talk about disordered eating patterns and behaviors that cause you distress and impact how you function. Working with a therapist allows you to talk about the discomfort you experience when you don’t feel “in control” and helps you understand the circumstances that trigger you. We aim to improve your relationship with food so that you are no longer consumed with worry which will allow your behaviors to change.
What To Expect In Eating Disorder Treatment Sessions
We will explore your beliefs and behaviors related to food and differentiate between those that are helpful and those that are not. By examining the emotions and fears that underlie your disordered eating patterns, you will better understand what drives you to restrict your diet, binge eat, or purge. With this understanding, we can then discuss ways to manage your emotions and fears differently.
In the process of learning about eating disorders, you will also learn a lot about yourself. You will also discover the emotional needs your eating disorder is currently filling. If, for example, a need for control in your life is leading to diet restriction, your therapist will help you fulfill this need in healthier ways by providing you with different coping skills. Identifying how your eating disorder has become part of your life will be key to dismantling it.
Our Modalities For Eating Disorder Treatment
We have found the most effective therapy for treating eating disorders—such as food addiction and binge eating disorder—are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Utilizing these modalities will help you learn to tolerate emotions that you currently have difficulty addressing without engaging in disordered eating. Once we identify the distorted thoughts and beliefs that contribute to negative emotions, we can help you replace them with healthier thoughts and behaviors.
If you have felt burdened by the shame of your eating disorder, there is a new path forward. Eating disorder therapy can help you achieve a healthy diet and lifestyle and manage the worry and anxiety you are currently experiencing.
But You May Wonder Whether Eating Disorder Therapy Is Right For You…
I’m afraid that if I attend eating disorder counseling, I will lose control and gain too much weight.
When your life has been taken over by diet restriction, it’s a common fear that any disruption to your current habits will result in weight gain. However, the primary goal of eating disorder therapy will not be for you to gain weight. Rather, it’s to help you diminish your worries and fears related to food and weight as well as decrease behaviors that you may feel are shameful. When you learn to release these fears, eventually your attention will be less fixated on food, which opens you up to new experiences.
Eating disorder treatment hasn’t helped before and has sometimes made me feel worse—I don’t know if I should try therapy again.
Most people who come to us with a history of eating disorders and food addiction have tried therapy before with limited success. Our experience with evidence-based treatments—combined with our understanding of eating disorders—allows our clients to feel more understood and confident about the effectiveness of the strategies they will learn. Working with a therapist who specializes in eating disorders offers a new opportunity to address your problem once and for all.
What if I’m ashamed to talk about my eating disorder or food addiction to a counselor?
We understand how difficult it may be for you to describe thoughts and behaviors you may consider shameful. After all, therapy requires you to open up about things that others may have criticized, judged, or didn’t understand. However, the thoughts and behaviors you struggle with will be met first and foremost with compassion. Our goal is to guide you through eating disorder therapy at a pace you can tolerate without fear of judgment.
Talk to an Eating Disorder Therapist in San Diego or Encinitas, CA
You Can Banish The Worry And Anxiety Related To Food
When you no longer are consumed with the idea of food, there is so much more to life. If you would like to find out more about eating disorder therapy in San Diego with us, and would like a free consultation, you may call 858-461-9409 or visit our contact page.