Emotional Eating

Mindfulness Therapy For Eating Disorders

November 20, 2009
By Irina Webster

Mindfulness therapy means teaching people to have a calm awareness of self and the person’s body functions, feelings and content of her/his consciousness. With mindfulness therapy people can reorganize their thinking in response to abnormal eating disorder urges.

Mindfulness can also help people to change their behaviour in response to the negative eating disorder thoughts they have, into something more useful and constructive.

Eventually this will change the person’s brain map. Everyone has a brain map, you have a certain map as you read this, but it changes as you learn new things. Mindfulness can change the Map for the better not the worst.

The techniques of mindfulness are simple.
1. Learn to see yourself from the out side. It is like taking a step out of your own body and watching what you are doing as a third person.

It is much more difficult to engage yourself in something bad like binging-purging or starving yourself if you see yourself not from the perspective of “I’ but a third person view like “She or he”.

Throughout the day, step back and ask yourself: “What is she /he doing?”, “What is she/ he feeling?”, “What is she/ he thinking?”. This process is called self-observation.

2. Another technique is to be able to see your life as a story. In your self-talk use the third person perspective, give yourself a role and observe yourself. In your story give your character (yourself) certain roles you would like to have in real life and follow it.

Think of it like a friend saying to you why do you want to continue starving yourself, or why do you want to binge and purge: do you really want to do that?

3. Take mental notes. When you became distracted and feel that you want to binge again. The strategy of taking notes may be very useful when you feel like going for a binge. For example, you have certain feelings at this particular moment: anger, loneliness, boredom, annoyance, fear, jealousy or other feelings that knock you off balance and takes you down the wrong path.

Don’t try to fight these feelings but acknowledge these feelings, put a label on them. Labelling your feelings means saying in your own mind or even out loud statements like ” I am bored”, “I am nervous”, ” I am jealous” etc.

When people make notes like these the part of the brain which is responsible for your distracting emotions are calmed down. Some people can train themselves by taking mental notes to become calm in the middle of a storm.

There are more strategies of mindfulness you can learn and apply them to beat your eating disorder.

But the main benefits of mastering mindfulness techniques are:

- Managing depression, anxiety and stress associated with eating disorders.
- Improving self-esteem which is damaged in nearly all ED sufferers.
- Improving greater sense of well-being.
- Improving physical health: correct blood pressure, increase immunity, diminishes physical stress responses.
- Becoming less disturbed by and less reactive to unpleasantness.
- Developing self-acceptance which is extremely important for ED sufferers.
- Balancing your life and experiencing less emotional ups and downs.

To conclude, mindfulness is an incredible way to balance out your life. People with eating disorders and who also suffer from stress, depression, anxiety, chronic pains, insomnias, mood disturbances and addictions should try mindfulness therapy.

Simply because when you have mastered it, it is free to use, it has no side effects and will give you the control you are lacking now.

Dr Irina Webster MD is the Director of Women Health Issues Program. She is a recognised authority in the eating disorders area. She is the author of the published book “Cure Your Eating Disorder: 5 Step Program to Cure Your Brain”. To learn more about Mindfulness therapy for Eating Disorder go to http://meditation-sensation.com

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