Every person’s eating disorder is unique as a fingerprint. Very often people fail to resolve their eating struggles because they have not found the right approach for them. Our therapists at The Mindful Eating Project will custom tailor an individualized and unique treatment plan for you.

People with eating disorders or body image dissatisfaction believe weight loss is the “medicine” that will cure all their life’s problems. But, in fact, weight loss by itself is not a cure for binge eating disorder or obesity. And weight gain by itself is not a cure for anorexia nervosa.

Therapy will help you resolve your inner struggles related to food, appearance, and body image so you can finally make peace with these issues.

In therapy, we combine behavioral/cognitive techniques plus psychotherapy.

Behavioral/cognitive techniques:

The behavioral and cognitive work involves helping you identify hurtful eating patterns and negative thoughts and find other ways to calm and relieve yourself besides food. We help you bring into awareness the people, places, and times that most cause you distress: after dinner time, nighttime, weekends, going to parties, driving alone in your car. And then we can plot alternative strategies such as keeping a food and mood journal where you can release feelings through writing rather than eating or choosing a “food friend” whom you can reach out by phone rather than binging, purging, or withholding food.

We teach people:

• You need to cultivate self-compassion for your journey. Lack of compassion and guilt will result in your returning destructively to the food and overeating as a way of both comforting and punishing yourself.

• One slip does not erase all of your progress.

• Your goal is to work towards progress with your eating, not perfection.

• Ask yourself, how can I learn from this experience to better prepare me for the next time?

Psychotherapy Techniques:

People recruit binging, purging or food restriction in order to deny, detour, distract themselves from their inner problems. We cannot heal what we cannot feel, so a therapist becomes your personal guide who can help you become more aware and “digest” inner difficult feelings. We call therapy “the talking cure.”

Some of the emotional triggers that lead people to binge, purge, or starve include: depression, anxiety, trauma, grief, anger, fear of intimacy, substance abuse, panic disorder, loneliness, shame, guilt, boredom, rejection, resentment, disappointment.

Therapy helps bring these emotions out to the clear light of day so you can learn to separate your food from your feelings, your emotions from your eating.

Medication:

Sometimes in the treatment of eating disorders, medication can be helpful. Since a significant percentage of eating disorder patients suffer from depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, premenstrual syndrome, medications will help alleviate these symptoms and relieve some of the eating disorder behavior as well.

Awareness of Emotional Triggers + Action with behavioral strategies = Results

No one should have to suffer in silence. If you think you may have an eating disorder, please reach out to The Mindful Eating Project for an evaluation and help. You are not alone!

Submitted by Mary Anne Cohen

Director – The New York Center for Eating Disorders