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Food addiction and food disorder therapy
Food addiction & food disorder therapy. At Pinnacle we use CBT & EMDR therapy for food addiction. Your therapist, specialising in food addition, will work with you to help you understand & overcome your disorder.
Eating disorders explained
Eating disorders can be explained as a negative attitude towards food, severe enough to change the person’s eating habits. Someone suffering from an eating disorder may develop an obsessive habit to monitor their weight and body shape, gaining an unhealthy relationship with food and exercise which may cause damage to their health.
Eating disorders can take the form of food addiction, emotional eating, binge eating, food aversion, and overeating.
The most common eating disorders are bulimia and anorexia. Bulimia is diagnosed when a person attempts to control their weight by inducing vomiting after binge eating. Anorexia is when a person attempts to maintain a very low weight. This is achieved through lack of eating or over-exercising.
At Pinnacle we take each disorder seriously and our specialist eating disorder therapists will work with you to help you understand and overcome your disorder.
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Food addiction in more detail
Food addiction, sometimes referred to as compulsive eating, is when a person loses control over their eating habits, causing them to compulsively overeat certain foods. The episode will take place regardless of whether the person is hungry or not.
Overeating can have a huge impact on your mental and physical wellbeing and can often be an emotional response to negative thoughts.
What are the most common signs of a food addiction disorder?
● Unable to stop eating certain foods, even when not hungry
● Feeling that food controls of your life, not you
● Eating so excessively that it affects your everyday life
● Eating for comfort and to reduce any negative emotions
● Being secretive about your eating habits
● Experiencing guilt or shame after overeating
● Being unable to concentrate on essential everyday activities and tasks at work and home
● Eating to the point of feeling unwell
● Going to extreme lengths to get hold of food when it’s not readily available
● Having to eat increasing amounts of food to feel full
If you recognise any of these symptoms or behaviours in yourself or someone you know, you should consider counselling.
Our approach to food disorder therapy
An eating disorder is a sensitive subject and we take the utmost care with our clients. Our aim is to create a safe environment where you can be yourself. Mostly we use talking therapies in treating eating disorders, the primary therapies are Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
We understand that ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ and that each of our clients is different and has their own set of unique needs and circumstances.
Recovery from eating disorders is a slow process, by using EMDR and CBT we can help you come to terms with your situation and set goals and positive outcomes.
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Using EMDR for food addiction disorder - what is EMDR?
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing) therapy was originally developed to treat post-traumatic stress disorders, including experiences of war. It is highly effective for trauma but has since been found to have far reaching applications for many different types of disorders.
How does EMDR therapy for food addiction help?
Some people don’t want to talk about what is troubling them, particularly those suffering from a food addiction disorder; it can be difficult to ’open up’ and explore why they are feeling this way. Some people don’t fully know. That’s not a problem with EMDR because it enables us to work blind to the actual issue: sometimes we work with people and treat them without needing to discuss any of the specifics.
EMDR in more detail
Imagine watching a film back in your mind of an incident or trigger which made you anxious, and then pausing it at the worst moment: the part that really encapsulates the trauma or upset you felt. That’s what we get our patients to do, replaying it in their mind. We ask them to notice something in the past, and then notice something in the present. We call it bilateral stimulation.
We do this because the part of our brain that processes that event, the reptilian part of our brain, doesn’t know how to handle the incident or trigger and can’t store it as a memory. EMDR helps to change that.
What actually happens in an EMDR therapy session?
The EMDR therapy stimulates both the left and right sides of the brain, using a range of techniques including hand movements, alternating lights or vibrating sensors, while the client recalls the event which is the cause of the anxiety.
The effect of EMDR is similar to Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, during which the brain makes sense of the day’s events, reprocessing the memory and releasing negative emotions and associations. Our trained EMDR therapists will guide you through the process helping you to work through your particular experiences.
Using cognitive behavioural therapy for food addiction
CBT is particularly effective in treating emotional eating disorders. CBT is about looking at the relationship between your thoughts and feelings, and how they make you ‘default’ to certain behaviours. It’s seen as a different kind of ‘talking therapy’ that aims to solve a person’s current problems. In effect it helps you become your own therapist, where you use the skills you have learned.
By using CBT, we can help make you aware of what your own defaults are: sometimes they help us, sometimes they don’t – CBT helps you recognise those different responses for what they are.
How does CBT help?
What can you expect from a food addiction disorder session?
CBT teaches you how to break out of those default patterns to become more resilient in situations you may find uncomfortable or stressful by identifying where you respond negatively and then challenging those negative thoughts with alternative, positive ones.
CBT is a way to rewire the software of your brain, rehearsing troubling situations in your mind in order to create alternative ways of thinking when that situation arises again. In effect, you’re creating new mental circuitry by challenging and changing old responses that feel hardwired in, but aren’t.
With CBT therapy, your therapist acknowledges that there may be behaviours that you cannot control through rational thought. Rather, these harmful coping strategies are as a result of prior conditioning from the environment and other internal or external stimuli.
By taking (what can feel like) insurmountable tasks and teaching you how to apply a pragmatic and objective viewpoint to these issues, CBT gradually changes the way you look at everyday challenges.
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If you’re still unsure whether you need us or not then simply send us any questions you may have via the enquiry form on the right.