Overeating Therapy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Sometimes clients come to me asking to lose weight. I start asking them about their relationship with food and it turns out that they have compulsive overeating. Binge eating is a type of anxiety disorder in which a person eats to cope with their anxiety.

Binge eating disorder has the same underlying cause as other anxiety disorders. The reason is that a person does not fulfill his needs and feelings, and the energy that is allocated for this remains inside and takes on the character of anxiety. For example, I would like to scream now, and I stop this impulse, but there is energy on it and this energy turns into anxiety. And anxiety is already acquiring habitual forms, individual for each person. These can be phobias, panic attacks, anxiety about money, the future, appearance, or, in our case, compulsive overeating.

During childhood, children who subsequently developed binge eating disorder found themselves in situations where their needs were not met by their parents. Either because of insufficient attention to the child, or because the parents themselves do not have sensitivity to their needs, they do not have the skills to satisfy them, and the child does not have the opportunity to gradually learn to understand what I feel, what I want and how to deal with all this …

The parent only feeds the child, while not satisfying his other needs, such as acceptance, attention, respect, admiration. The child then has no choice but to try to satisfy all his needs through food. At the same time, a parent, seeing a plump child, may be unhappy with how he looks, how much he eats, and then he begins to try to control this food. And then food, in general, becomes the center of their relationship.

It also happens that in the family it is customary that all conversations are conducted only at the table during meals, and the rest of the time the child cannot get the attention of the parents.

All this leads to the fact that a lot in a child's life becomes tied to food. And it becomes more and more impossible to realize his needs through some other things, and initially he does not learn this, and then, even if something arose, his skills were not fixed.

A client with binge eating disorder has a disrupted satisfaction cycle. When we first realize our need, then we realize it, then we feel satisfaction. Moreover, all stages of this cycle have been violated.

In therapy, we first return the client to the area of his needs, teach him to listen and hear what is happening there besides food.

Next, you need to learn how to implement these needs. These skills practically do not exist in a person with overeating, because in childhood no one taught him how people deal with their needs. What should I do if I want to scream, but I don't want our relationship to end? Or if I want to go to a club and my partner is a stay-at-home, what should I do?

And a person gradually begins to understand that the hunger that he is experiencing is not always about physical hunger, and he can learn to ask himself: what do I want now? Do I want to sleep now, drink, communicate with someone, do I need to be hugged, talk to someone about my feelings? It sounds simple, but in fact it is a multi-month work, this is a skill that takes time, constant monitoring of myself - what do I want now.

You also need to learn to listen not only to the feeling of hunger, in the direct and metaphorical sense, but also to distinguish what kind of “hunger” it is, that is, what kind of need it is, learn to adequately satisfy it, and also listen to the feeling of “satiety”, satisfaction. Feelings "when I have eaten" and "I don't need any more today."When there is "too much talk today" or "too much silence today" or "I have enough people for today." Distinguish between "habit", which is marked with disgust and real satiety, which is marked with satisfaction.

Gradually, this diversity of life, which becomes available to a person, imperceptibly reduces the amount of food, relations with food become healthier when they are no longer at the forefront. A person suddenly notices that in those situations in which he previously had thoughts about "a bucket of chicken wings", these thoughts no longer arise. That he hasn't overeating for a while, that his weight has already dropped, and this is no longer as important as it was at the very beginning.

Overeating is such a crooked way of a person to be in contact with the world. And overeating therapy, changing relationships with food is not about starting to control food even more, because in this case the importance of food only increases and it does not work. This is about slowly and gradually discovering other aspects of life in a person's life, which can bring different feelings and be related to other needs. The deeper his understanding of himself, the less problems with eating behavior.

The difficulty in working with such clients is that sometimes a person does not care about overeating itself, but only his weight. And all he wants is to lose weight, preferably quickly and permanently. There are funny cases when at the first meeting the client demands to provide him with guarantees of results and measurable criteria by which he will understand that the therapy is progressing successfully. We have to explain that therapy is not a business, and there can be no guarantees, and the criteria by which he can judge the success of therapy, he can choose himself according to his taste, because they are very individual. It turns out that a person came to lose weight, and then he is offered to delve into his feelings and needs, that is, to do what he is very unpleasant, and what he avoids all his life with the help of compulsive overeating. At the same time, neither a business plan, nor investment guarantees. So so business proposal. Are you ready to invest in such a project?